Freelance Writer/Editor

Agriculture

14 December 2018

By now, the wine-drinking public is familiar with sustainability descriptors like organic, biodynamic, and even natural. They’ve been to LEED-certified wineries, and they may even have heard about a more holistic certification, called B Corps, which takes into account the way a business treats its employees, its environment, and its community. But a new wave of winemakers is working with ultra-sustainable practices—some of which are so groundbreaking they don’t even have a certification yet. SevenFifty Daily spoke with winemakers who are setting the bar with green building and agroecological farming practices to learn why they’re worth pursuing—and how they can help create a more sustainable future.

A “Living Building” Tasting Room

A few years ago, when Cowhorn winemaker Bill Steele was planning a new tasting room at his Jacksonville, Oregon, winery, he had a game-changing conversation with Stephen Aiguier, the founder and president of Green Hammer. Steele and his wife, Barbara, knew they wanted a green building. Aiguier listened as Steele talked about his aversion to chemicals in the field and in the cellar.

“We wanted a building that was consistent with our biodynamic farming philosophy,” says Steele, whose winery is located in the Applegate Valley AVA. “And Stephen said, ‘It sounds like you’re describing the Living Building Challenge.’” Once Aiguier started explaining it, the Steeles were all in.

The most rigorous standard for green buildings in the world, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) was formulated by the Seattle-based International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in 2006. It’s designed around seven performance areas, referred to as petals. Unlike other certifiers of green buildings, the ILFI won’t certify a building until a full year after it’s completed. That’s because some of the building’s petals—namely, energy and water—require 12 months of continuous occupancy before they can be shown to work in accordance with the challenge. The Energy Petal requires that the building produce 10 percent more energy than it consumes; the Water Petal requires (among other things) that 100 percent of the project’s water needs be supplied by captured precipitation or other natural closed-loop water systems.

There’s a reason it’s called a challenge.

For Green Hammer and the Steeles, it was the Materials Petal that posed the biggest challenge—it requires the architect to reject materials that contain any one of more than 800 chemicals on the International Living Future Institute’s Red List. Since there are no reporting standards for the building industry, this means the architect of an LBC project has to call each manufacturer to ask if its products contain any of the Red List chemicals. Aiguier spent more than a thousand hours on the phone with companies, asking questions about their products’ components and microcomponents. When making these calls, he says, “you sound like a crazy hippie. A lot of people essentially hang up.”

Barb and Bill Steele of Cowhorn. Photo by Clair Thorington.

But the Green Hammer team persisted. Fortunately, the ILFI has a product database of nontoxic building materials (made without Red List chemicals) called Declare. High-profile companies—Etsy and Google, for example—have publicly signed on to using Declare products in their buildings. As a result, materials vendors are starting to reformulate their products and be more transparent about what’s in them.

In May 2018, Cowhorn’s tasting room became the first winery tasting room in the world to be named a Certified Living Building. And it’s not that other wineries haven’t tried. Sokol Blosser, which had already achieved a U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification for its barrel cellar in 2002, aimed for LBC with its new tasting room but was unable to achieve certification.

31 July 2018

The 2017 Eagle Creek fire is seared into Oregon winemaker Michael Garofola’s memory. Since February 2017 he had been working with a 0.61 acre block of Dolcetto for his Cutter Cascadia label in the von Flowtow vineyard on the west side of Hood River, and the fruit was just beginning to ripen. On September 18, the fire was raging. Hood River was on Stage 2 evacuation notice—locals might get a call at any moment to drop everything, grab their family members and pets, and get out. In the meantime, Garofola—who leases this block and farms it solo—was thinning fruit and taking samples.

“You’re out there with a bandana over your face in the vineyards,” he says. “The sky is orange. It’s just like what you imagine the last skies over Vesuvius looked like. It’s dark. It’s eerie.” That particular day, Garofola didn’t get the call. “I did my work for the day, packed up, and drove back to Portland.”

During the fire, which started on September 2 and wasn’t fully controlled until November 30, the grapes were going through véraison—the onset of ripening, when the berries change color. “If the fire had happened a month before, it wouldn’t have been a problem,” explains Garofola. “But post-véraison [the grapes] are ripening, losing acidity, but their skins are becoming more porous.” The porousness makes it easier for the skins to soak up the smoke. Phenolic glycosides contained in the smoke, such as guaiacol and eugenol, which are initially bound with sugar, break apart and become volatile during fermentation.

the Dolcetto vineyard during the fires [Credit: Michael Garofola of Cutter Cascadia]

A Smoky Vintage

Most winemakers and critics abhor the taste of so-called smoke taint, using descriptors like “burnt,” “medicinal,” or “wet ashtray” to describe it. But instead of letting the grapes sit on the vine—as some neighboring growers did—or selling them off to the bulk market (a common practice at bigger wineries when smoke taint is detected), Garofola decided to go ahead and make a rosé and a red under his Cutter Cascadia label. Earlier this month, he released 30 cases of his rosé, called Strawberry Mullet, to Portland area shops including E&R Wine Shop, Division Wines, and Pairings Portland. He’ll bottle his red in late July.

“This is the climate of the vintage, without a doubt,” says Garofola, who is also the sommelier at Beast in Portland. “It’s not something I want to happen every year, obviously, but at the same time, I did with it what I felt was the best for the wine.” That is, he manipulated the wine as little as possible. After forest fires, some winemakers use carbon filtering, reverse osmosis, or manufactured yeast strains to mitigate or mask smoke taint, but not Garofola.

Making wine without such processes or additives was “the most authentic thing for me to do,” he says. “I’m not apologizing for the smoke. I’m not the one who started the goddamn fire! I’m just leaning into it.” Garofola says the smokiness of the rosé, which had almost no skin contact, is muted. The red—which obviously will have had more skin contact by the time he bottles it at the end of June—is a little riskier. Right now, the wine conjures a vivid sense memory for Garofola. “It reminds me of a tobacco shop my old man used to take me to in Indiana,” he says. “It smells exactly like black cherry tobacco.”

Hiyu Wine Farm winemaker Nate Ready is also unapologetic about his smoky 2017 vintage. He grows over 100 varieties at his main vineyard, five miles south of Hood River—this was the site that was most affected by the fires. In fact, Ready believes there’s a delicacy to these wines that comes from the fire, which delayed ripening and—because of the cover of smoke—created lower-alcohol grapes with a finer thread of acidity.

“The wildfires are totally part of the terroir,” says Ready. “That’s what’s so cool about wines—they reflect the culture and the ecosystem. And living in the West, we should get used to it. This is going to be part of the flavor of living in the West.”

Ready dislikes the term smoke taint because it labels a smoky character as a flaw. The smoky nature of his 2017 wines has made him more attuned to élevage, the progression of wines as they ferment in barrels. “You’re looking to take the wine to a place where these things express themselves in the cellar and evolve to a place where—Oh!—it’s more stable and compelling,” says Ready. “For sure, it’ll still change in bottle, but in ways that are more subtle.” As a result, he will probably hold the 2017 wines in barrel longer than usual. (Nothing has been bottled yet.)

Ready plans to talk openly about the forest fire’s effect on the grapes at tastings and in his newsletter. “I would just say, ‘There was a fire in 2017 and you can taste it in the wine. You can taste it structurally,’” says Ready, whose wines—he makes rosé, white, and red—are bottled under his Hiyu and Smockshop Band labels.

A Rauchwein for Aging

Barnaby Tuttle at Teutonic Wine Company in Portland is a little more brazen. Last year he committed to buying Riesling grapes from Laszlo Regos at Pear Blossom Vineyard in the Columbia Gorge. Needless to say, he didn’t anticipate a devastating wildfire—or that the grapes would come back from the lab with an exceptionally high sensory threshold level of guaiacol. Knowing that the chemical guaiacol was concentrated in the skins, Tuttle pressed the wine—whole cluster—as fast as he could. “And then I thought, ‘Hey, let’s have some fun. Let’s make a deliberately smoked wine!’” Tuttle recalls.

Tuttle explains that he and his crew crushed the fruit, did pigéage, or punch-down, and gave the wine four days on the skins. The result, which he bottled in April and calls Rauchwein (“smoke wine” in German), has an ever-so-subtle smoky scent. “I can feel it texturally on the palate,” says Tuttle, who has made enough Riesling to know what the mouthfeel should be. “And then, in the finish, there’s a kick that makes me think of mezcal.”

But the Rauchwein may become smokier over time. Teutonic’s tech notes for the wine say it’s meant to age “a long time.” Knowing that the smoky phenols may become more prominent as the wine ages, I ask if that concerns him. “I hope the taint grows in bottle,” he says. “I suppose there is a point [at which] the taint could be overwhelming, but it would have to grow exponentially for it to be a distraction. Maybe there is a risk to making interesting wines?”

After the winemakers grapple with the effects of the smoke and fire, however, it’s up to the retailers to sell the wines. Some retailers are talking up the smoked character of the 2017 vintage; others, not so much. Jeffrey Weissler, owner of Pairings Portland, has been pouring Garofola’s Strawberry Mullet for guests and is almost sold out. “People like it,” he says. “It’s an interesting, delicious, funky wine.” But he doesn’t push the forest fire angle. “It’s a sore spot for a lot of winemakers,” he says.

But Brent Braun, the sommelier at Portland’s OK Omens and Castagna, does talk to guests about the two smoky rosés he has on the by-the-glass menu at OK Omens. One is Strawberry Mullet and the other, a Dolcetto rosé made by winemaker Darryl Joannides of Viola Wine Cellars in Portland. “People love them. Especially the Strawberry Mullet because it’s so intensely smoky,” he says. “It’s so obvious. It’s fun!” Viola’s Dolcetto, on the other hand, is “lightly smoked,” says Braun. “It hits the classic notes. It’s a pretty light, refreshing patio rosé.”

Michael Wheeler of PDX Wine distributes Teutonic’s wines to restaurants and wine shops across Oregon and, when he’s doing a tasting, likes to talk about the smoky smells and flavors that resulted from the forest fires. “Or as I like to call it, terroir from the sky,” Wheeler says. “Taking what nature gave and making a true, full terroir wine—land and air. A pure wine of nature and the vintage.”

12 June 2018

I did a Q&A with the director of Linfield College’s pioneering Oregon Wine History Archive for SevenFifty Daily.

In SevenFifty Daily's Unsung Heroes series, we profile behind-the-scenes professionals in the drinks industry who are essential to making businesses function but who don’t normally get the spotlight.

Archivist Rich Schmidt (right), behind the camera.

In 2011, Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, established the Oregon Wine History Archive, an ambitious project to chronicle and preserve all aspects of the Oregon wine industry. Since then, Linfield—which has also hosted the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) every summer since 1987—has become a significant hub of wine education. In March of this year, after a $6 million gift from Grace and Ken Evenstad of Domaine Serene in the Dundee Hills, it became the first liberal arts school in the country to offer an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in wine studies.

The archive, located in a climate-controlled room at the Linfield library, houses everything from old photos and receipts to wine country guidebooks from the early ‘80s and land-use planning maps. “It’s a sweet space for a college of our size,” says Rich Schmidt, the director of archives. The archive’s online component is growing too. It currently contains over 200 oral histories—video interviews with winemakers, viticulturists, and others immersed in the state’s wine industry. SevenFifty Daily asked Schmidt about the genesis of the project, why Eric Asimov made the cut, and which oral histories will always stick with him.

25 May 2018

I wrote about Ben Jacobsen and his Oregon-harvested artisanal sea salt for Inc.'s May issue.

Netarts Bay, a protected estuary on the Oregon Coast, is an ideal spot to harvest salt. [Photo: Carlos Chavarría]

While attending business school in Copenhagen in 2004, Ben Jacobsen fell in love with Maldon sea salt, the flaky finishing salt prized by chefs. Returning to the United States--landing in Portland, Oregon--he was shocked to find that no one here was harvesting anything like that high-end sea salt.

After his mobile-app-discovery startup went belly-up, Jacobsen began lugging 275-gallon wine totes of seawater from Netarts Bay back to his home in Portland, where he re-created the laborious (and messy) process of evaporating the water to make salt. "I destroyed cookware and pots and pans and made a mess in the oven and everything else," Jacobsen says. "It was definitely a learning experience." Today, his category-defining American flaky sea salt is the favored salt of celebrity chefs.

The process of salt-making is now much more efficient at Jacobsen's 6,000-square-foot production facility on the Oregon coast, where the company has built custom equipment. Jacobsen's 42-person crew harvests 18,000 pounds of salt per month, which is then sent to the warehouse in Portland's Central Eastside to be packaged and shipped out to Williams Sonoma, Whole Foods, and thousands of other retailers across the country. "Like the people who went to California 240 years ago and wondered if it was possible to grow grapes and make wine there," says Jacobsen, "we're the first in our category to make great salt in the U.S. mainstream."

04 April 2018

I'd always thought of mead, the ancient alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey, as a cough syrup–like draught from Chaucer’s time. But a recent tasting organized by Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, author of The Art of Mead Tasting & Food Pairing, changed my mind: I sipped meads that ranged from a dry sparkler that reminded me of a refreshing rosé, to a marionberry variety aged with chile peppers. Turns out, mead has as much range and variety as wine—and just like its grape-based sibling, it has terroir as well. And there’s never been a better moment to try mead. There were only about 30 meaderies in the U.S. two decades ago, and today, there are over 500. Want to taste the trend? Start with a visit to one of these great craft mead taprooms.

James Boicourt and Andrew Geffken founded Charm City Meadworks in 2014 and have just opened a new facility with 10 meads on tap. Outside the tasting room, their still meads—evocative of wine—come in 500 ml bottles; the carbonated ones come in 12-ounce cans. (Distribution is currently limited to the D.C./ Maryland/ Northern Virginia area.) Favorites include basil lemongrass, sweet blossom, and the seasonal mango comapeño, which packs some heat.

Brothers Nick and Phil Lorenz make 15session-style meads (carbonated and less than 10 percent ABV), the most popular of which is “Sting”—made of freshly juiced ginger and white clover honey. (It won a gold medal at the Mazer Cup.) They’re also experimenting with sour meads (fermented with Brettanomyces and lactobacillus) and braggots (mead fermented with malted grains). If you can’t get to their Philomath tasting room, rest assured: their meads are distributed to 10 states including California, Georgia, and Texas.

Ash Fischbein has his high school English teacher to thank for his mead career: he read about the beverage in Beowulf. “Back then, it was more about, ‘How can I get my friends drunk?’” laughs Fischbein. Now, Fischbein and his cousin Matt own Sap House Meadery, where their stand-out melomels — mead fermented with fruit — win awards at the Mazer Cup International mead competition. At their new mead pub, lined with rough-sawn pine, you can taste mead cocktails, mead- mosas, and (on Friday nights) pair dry semi-sweet mead with oysters.

Greg Fischer was six when he began beekeeping, so it’s hardly surprising that he became a mead-maker, opening Illinois’ first meadery 17 years ago. At Wild Blossom Meadery’s posh tasting room, you can try bourbon-cask aged meads like Sweet Desire, a blueberry mead, and a Barolo-style red, Pyment, that’s co-fermented with grape skins.

23 January 2018

Maggie Harrison on her unconventional path to becoming a winemaker and her dedication to a difficult grape. (This story was originally published on SevenFifty Daily on Jan. 19, 2018.)

As soon as you taste one of Maggie Harrison’s wines—whether it’s an earthy Pinot Noir, a marvelously complex Chardonnay, or her lush, floral Roussanne—you understand why she has such a loyal following. What you taste in the glass comes from the unconventional ways in which this winemaker picks and ferments her fruit, particularly the Roussanne, a Rhône variety that’s notorious for ripening unevenly. For more than a decade, Harrison has been pulling the very best expressions out of a handful of varieties and making exquisite, nuanced wines at Antica Terra in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

The Epiphany

Harrison’s unlikely journey to becoming a winemaker started on an island off the coast of Kenya. With a degree in international relations and conflict resolution from Syracuse University in New York State, Harrison landed a job at the Carter Center in Atlanta but deferred acceptance so she could travel. After a year spent backpacking around Europe, another year in South America, and yet another year in Africa, she was less and less sure about pursuing a career in conflict resolution.

“One evening, on an island off the coast of Kenya, I was having a beer and a complete nervous breakdown,” Harrison says. “A fellow traveler from Mozambique was unlucky enough to have pulled up a seat next to me. I spent most of the evening explaining to him that I was feeling adrift. Finally, this guy put down his beer, exasperatedly, and looked me in the eye. ‘You’ve just spent half an hour telling me everything that’s impossible,’ he said, ‘everything you don’t want to do.’”

“Then he asked, ‘What is it that you want to do?’” Harrison considered the question for a moment and said she thought she’d like to learn how to make wine. The traveler asked if there were any grapes in her country and she said there were.

After leaving Africa, Harrison headed for a winery in California. It wasn’t just any winery but Sine Qua Non in Ventura County—the cult winery owned by Manfred and Elaine Krankl.

The Oregon Trail

After working eight vintages with the Krankls—a period she calls the most formative of her life—Harrison was asked by one of their dear friends to be the winemaker at a new venture in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills. She demurred.

“I had just begun Lillian—my own tiny Syrah project in California,” Harrison recalls, “and my first vintage was still resting in the barrel. I was afraid that if I took on another project, I would be stretching myself too thin.”

The owners of the new vineyard—Scott Adelson, John Mavredakis, and Michael Kramer—none of whom had winemaking or vineyard experience, were persistent. Ultimately, though, they accepted Harrison’s firm “No, thank you.” But they did ask her for a favor: Would she mind taking a look at the vineyard and giving them some pointers on how to farm it? Harrison flew up to Oregon on a rainy spring day.

Her arrival was not auspicious. One of the partners picked her up at the airport and drove her southwest to the Eola-Amity Hills. The weather was gray and bleak, and the endless suburban strip malls along 99W only made things seem bleaker. When she finally arrived at the vineyard, in the countryside northwest of Salem, a sign in barely legible script read “No Trespassing.” “The r was backwards,” Harrison recalls, “as if it had been written by an ax murderer.”

But once she set foot in the vineyard, Harrison fell in love with the property.

“To our left were wetlands and views of the ryegrass growing beyond. To our right, on a steep hillside, was a forest of gnarled, moss-covered oaks. When we reached the top of the hill, the first thing I noticed was the light,” Harrison says. “The clouds fractured over the vineyard and allowed the sun to ray through… I could see the vineyard—a sea of yellow leaves and stunted shoots. The vines were at the beginning of their growth cycle, but they were already beginning to defoliate. The site was so beautiful, the potential so clear—but the suffering was equally clear.” Harrison had only been there a minute before she ducked behind one of the oaks, called her then-boyfriend (now husband), and said, simply, “We’re moving to Oregon.”

Luckily, he agreed.

Harrison finished her last vintage of Sine Qua Non in 2005, and in 2006 she became an owner—with Adelson, Mavredakis, and Kramer—of the 40-acre property in the Eola-Amity Hills. At the time, only six acres were under vine. But since then, she’s planted another 13, bringing the vineyard to just under 20 acres. It’s here that Harrison grows Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes and bottles them under the Antica Terra label.

Reckoning with Roussanne

But Lillian, Harrison’s California project, lives on. Each fall, she flies south to California and picks Syrah, Roussanne (which she started sourcing in 2011), and (in the past) Cabernet Sauvignon. The clusters, carefully stacked in vented plastic totes, are sent to Oregon by refrigerated truck to be sorted and fermented at the Antica Terra facility in Dundee. The resulting wines are bottled under the Lillian label, named after Harrison’s maternal grandmother.

Harrison has a particular passion for Roussanne, the only white wine she makes under the Lillian label. If you ask her how she produces it, she grows animated, eager to share the unique methods she’s devised to get the most out of this tricky variety.

Lillian and Antica Terra bottles at Harrison's Eola-Amity Hill Vineyard (the Roussanne is at left)

“There is not a tremendous amount of Roussanne grown in this country, because of its somewhat annoying habits,” Harrison says. “The growers struggle with it because it ripens incredibly late, and the winemakers struggle because it ripens incredibly unevenly.” (Jon Bonné, in his book The New California Wine, reports that fewer than 400 acres of Roussanne are planted statewide.)

“Roussanne is the least uniform grape variety I’ve ever seen,” says Harrison. “A single vine will have clusters that are green, yellow, gold, amber, rusted, and botrytis. Nothing is ripe at the same time.” That’s a major frustration for most vineyardists, but it became a creative challenge for Harrison. Her work-around is to pick when 80 to 85 percent of the fruit is perfectly ripe and then collate by color.

“Roussanne becomes really russet when it’s ripe—deeply amber and a little bit scaly,” says Harrison. She and her vineyard team bring the whole block in at once and then separate it by color at the sorting table. First they sort by clusters—one box for the greenest, then gold, then amber—as well as a box for the fruit with the highest percentage of botrytis. The grapes on the richest end of the spectrum are sorted one by one. Harrison handles each of these boxes differently.

The grapes on the lightest end—the greenest ones with the highest acid—she handles like Chardonnay. “I’ll give them 10 to 18 hours in the press,” she says, “and then [send them] directly into barrel.” The yellowish grapes, she’ll macerate on the skins for six hours and then take them to the press. Deeply golden grapes she might let macerate on the skins for as many as 20 hours to extract maximum aromatics, flavor compounds, and textures. Says Harrison, “We’re trying to eke out what’s there.”

Finally come the richest grapes. “The challenge here,” says Harrison, “is really how you’re going to access the aromas you know are there—in the gentlest way possible.” Instead of walking on the fruit with rubber boots (the way winemakers may do when making a dessert wine like Sauternes), she macerates and ferments the fruit on the skins for three to five days, gently washing the skins with the juice twice a day until the aromatics crack open and the flavors become really clear. Each of these Roussanne wine groups is fermented in barrel, separately, for a year. “Then we take samples and take them to the blending table,” says Harrison. “That’s where we find the ratio that comes together to form the most compelling whole.” The result is a highly aromatic, floral wine with a lush texture and an almost oily quality.

A few years ago, Harrison was at a dinner party at a winemaker’s house in California. She says the winemaker exclaimed, “We hate Roussanne!”

The reason it’s a turnoff for some, she surmises, is that it’s a low-acid grape. “If you try to retain the acid that exists, you lose out on the dripping honey beeswax characteristic,” she says. “But if you forgo that, you lose all the acid.”

In her inimitable way, Harrison has figured out a method for working with the fruit and pulling the best aromas, flavors, and textures from it to create the finest expression of a Roussanne.

16 January 2018

Over a decade ago, while filmmaker Laura Dunn was making her first feature documentary, “The Unforeseen,” farmer and poet Wendell Berry graciously invited her into his Henry County, Kentucky home so she could record him reading the poem from which the movie’s title originates. Like many, Dunn was moved by Berry’s presence, and she’s been working to bring his worldview to a wider audience ever since.

Earlier this year, she released “Look and See,” an unconventional documentary about Berry’s life. In the film, Berry himself is elusive, never actually appearing on camera in the present day. Instead, the film is filled with still images of Berry on his farm in the early years, television footage from the 1970s of him opining about changes to agriculture, and his resonant voice floating over gorgeously shot images of Kentucky farmland.

Dunn knew early on that Berry would not agree to be filmed. But rather than abandon the project entirely, she took this as a creative challenge. As a result, “Look and See” offers a view of the world from Berry’s eyes instead. Over the course of the film, you meet Berry’s daughter, Mary; his wife, Tanya; and numerous Kentucky farmers whose struggle to stay on the land in the face of consolidation is the subject of much of Berry’s work.

The film also captures Berry’s debate with Earl Butz, the now famous U.S. secretary of agriculture under Nixon and Ford, and a major proponent of industrialization of agriculture. In his rebuttal, Berry pays homage to the “traditional farmer” who “first fed himself off his farm and then fed other people; who farmed with his family, and passed the land on to people who knew it and had the best reason to take care of it. That farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values. Our values. Independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberty, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood. Values that declined as that farmer is replaced by technologies whose only standard is profit.”

“Look and See,” which has been screened in communities across the country through TUGG (a theatrical booking site for indie films), debuted on Netflix in October. Civil Eats spoke to Dunn about telling the story of Berry’s life, her unconventional filmmaking methods, and why she sees Berry’s novels as the heart of his oeuvre.

When did you first read Wendell Berry’s writing and what imprinted itself upon you?

I read The Unsettling of America in high school. My mom is a [corn] geneticist—and very much an environmentalist, an agricultural person. Because of that, I was interested in these ideas. And then I read more of his stuff in college; he was a writer I really loved. But when I was working on my first feature, “The Unforeseen,” [executive producer] Terrence Malik wanted me to find some voices to include in the film … So I delved deeply into his work—mostly his poetry. And then I reread The Unsettling. And I really fell in love with his poetry and his work again.

And why did you decide to make this film, so many years later?

When we toured “The Unforeseen,” I was really surprised by how few people knew who Wendell Berry was. I feel like more people should be familiar with Berry’s work.

Can you talk about what it was like to make a film about Berry without including him in it? And I take it that wasn’t your choice?

It was the constraint he put on me. He is really anti-screen: no computers, T.V., or movies. He thinks it contributes to the decline of literacy and the deterioration of imagination. And I knew that, so I knew this would be a challenge.

He didn’t want to be filmed—it makes him feel so inauthentic. So, in those early conversations, I said to him, “I understand. I actually think that’s very insightful information about you. If we could just do audio interviews, that would be interesting. I want you to point me to what we should see.” So I accepted that constraint. And it was his wife Tanya who would say, “This is who you should talk to.”

Can you say anything about the black-and-white still photos at the heart of the film?

James Baker Hall, one of Wendell’s dearest friends, passed away in 2009. He was a writer and professor at the University of Kentucky, and he took all these gorgeous black-and-white photos. His widow had boxes and boxes of never-before-seen negatives and when we found them, I thought, “There’s a film here that we could piece together.” It’s sort of impressionist-style.

Who are the farmers you interview throughout, and why do you choose not to name them in the course of the film?

Everyone in the film is a friend or a neighbor of Berry’s. Sometimes I watch the film and think, “Maybe I should have named them.” Form is something I’m constantly experimenting with. There are standard things you’re supposed to do in a documentary. I had it with their names for a long time. Then I thought, “It becomes so literal-minded.” I want people to feel something. We live in such an information age. I don’t want more data. I want something that’s going to transport me to a place. I’m making the film I want to see.

Can you speak about the beautiful wood engravings that start each chapter of the film?

Wesley Bates has illustrated a lot of Wendell’s books. [Co-director/producer] Jef Sewell, my husband, did the visual design. I wanted it to be chapters like in a book. So he said, “We have to find Wesley Bates.” He’s an amazing, vibrant artist in his 60s, who lives in Toronto. They’d have conversations over the phone and then he’d sketch something and then we’d give him feedback.

Throughout the film, we hear Berry reading his poems. How did you choose which poems to include?

It was really tough. “The Window Poem” was something I had read many years ago and that was really in mind when we started the film. It’s about the tension between the grit of our world and the patterns. My approach was to go to Henry County and do a portrait of this place. We’d go and I’d spend a few weeks, find what stories were compelling. We’d shoot all the footage and then you edit it and you find narratives—poems to frame things. This illustrates this idea, or that idea.

I was familiar with his essays and poetry, but I didn’t know that he also wrote novels. Can you say a little about them?

I honestly think his novels are the heart of his work. Basically, every single novel is told through the eyes of a different character in a small town in Kentucky. The more you read, the more complete a picture you get.

Berry is hard to categorize, and you get at that in the film where his wife Tanya says, “Some people would think he’s a novelist and some think he’s an essayist and some think he’s a poet…” How do you see him?

I see him as an artist. I think his nonfiction writing is infused with poetics all over the place. He sees segmentation or categorization as a function of the industrial mind. He very much believes in interdisciplinary thought. So I think he’s deliberately defying … category. He doesn’t want to be limited.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “Look and See” is available on Netflix; the trailer is below.

Ricardo Salvador, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and director of its Food and Environment Program, has spent a lifetime writing and talking about what an equitable food system might look like. On a recent, unseasonably sunny October evening at The Redd on Salmon in Portland, Oregon, he offered 800 food system innovators a reminder about the size and scope of institutional racism in our current food system, underlined the urgency of food justice work, and offered concrete actions we can all take to create positive change.

“We live in a very unjust, inequitable society,” began Salvador. “And the brunt of the inequity is felt through the food system.” Salvador detailed how we got here through the dark history of colonization—from the genocide of the myriad Native American tribes, whose land we stole, to the African citizens who were abducted and enslaved by the English and then the Americans.

“From the standpoint of an economist, the way you generate wealth is that you have access to at least one of the factors of production: land, labor, rent,” Salvador said. From the 1830s until the 1880s, he noted, we drove the original inhabitants of this continent off their land, quite literally depriving them of their food as well as their food culture.

“If you want to find some of the most immiserated human beings on the planet—not just in the United States—you would go to the concentration camps that we call the reservations,” Salvador said. “Here is where you will find people whose land was taken from them, and therefore their foodways, their ways of accessing the natural resources upon which they based their entire cultures and they way that they nourished themselves.”

Similarly, the Africans who were taken from their homeland and brought to the U.S. by the slave trade were driven against their will from their land and were forced to be the unpaid labor to allow white Americans to profit. “What those people were enslaved to do was actually to drive the beginning of what today we call Big Ag,” Salvador said.

Tragically, slavery has not disappeared. To this day, exploited farm labor is what keeps the cost of food so cheap in this country. “Farm labor is the most essential, the most important part of our food system, and the most undervalued,” Salvador said.

“We spend as little as 6 to 12 percent of our disposable income on food. That is usually quoted as something that we should be very proud of. But it should be a national shame,” he said. “It’s as if the workers involved in the food industry and nature that is required to produce the food were costs to be minimized…We need to find a way in which we actually value all of those resources—the land and the people that are involved.”

One of the long-simmering questions facing those striving for better food for all is how to go beyond voting with your fork? Is it possible to create a new food system that does not rely on exploitation?

Salvador made a case for profound system shifts like reparations, loan forgiveness programs, and immigration reform. He urged people to work independently and collectively to support these goals and the great food-system reform work that’s already afoot in our communities around this country. Among his suggestions:

• Support Reparations to the descendants of enslaved peoples. One place to start is to urge your members of Congress to support Rep. John Conyers’ (D–MI) bill, HR 40: Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.

• Support immigration and labor reforms that value labor and provide for dignified livelihood. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, and realistic transition initiatives such as the proposed “Blue Card” program.

• Get your elected officials to read and support Oregon senator Earl Blumenauer’s roadmap for an alternative Farm Bill “Growing Opportunities.”

• Get your local school district to sign onto the Good Food Purchasing program, a metric-based framework that encourages institutions to direct their buying power toward local economies, environmental sustainability, a valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. (L.A. Unified School District, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, and Chicago Public Schools have all already signed on.)

In closing his presentation at the Redd, Salvador came back to his original question.

“Do we know enough to create a food system that does not rely on exploitation?” he asked. “Yes, we know enough to produce our food without exploiting nature, and we definitely know enough to produce our food without exploiting people…. Let me just put a very sharp point on it for you: The question is not really: ‘Do we know enough to be better?’ The question is: ‘Will we?’”

19 September 2017

When Cattail Creek Lamb owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch near Junction City, Oregon to Portland, where the bulk of his customers were located.

“I’d leave the farm, drive 100 miles to the processor, pack the order myself, do the invoices by hand in the truck, and then go make 20-25 deliveries at restaurants around Portland,” said Neumeister, who will turn 70 next month. He would crash at a friend’s house in Portland, then do more deliveries the next day, on the way back home.

These 15-hour-days took their toll, but they also didn’t allow Neumeister, who has been raising pastured lamb since he took over his family’s flock in high school, any time to drum up new business or work on long-term sales strategy. And if he got a last-minute order from a Portland restaurant who suddenly ran out of lamb mid-week there was little he could do about it.

“If a chef called me on Thursday, I might say ‘You know, I can see if UPS can deliver it,’” Neumeister said. Which meant trying—sometimes in vain—to stalk his local UPS driver, whose delivery route he knew by heart. If he couldn’t locate the UPS truck, Neumeister was out of luck.

“And then the restaurant would end up buying from one of my competitors.”

A B-Line trike rider leaves the Redd with a refrigerated box full of food for Portland area restaurants

Now, thanks to the Redd on Salmon, a Portland food hub created by the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust, Neumeister not only has freezer storage space for up to 3,600 pounds of lamb in Central Eastside Portland, he’s got a stall for staging orders, an office space, and built-in distribution via B-Line trikes to Portland area restaurants.

Best of all, there’s no need to chase down UPS drivers. When a restaurant needs a special order of pastured lamb, as happened earlier this month with chef Joshua McFadden’s Tusk, all Neumeister needs to do is call B-line, who also does fulfillment for Cattail Creek.

16 August 2017

In the late spring of 2014, Janaki Jagannath and her colleagues had left a community meeting and were standing in the dusty basketball court inside Cantua Elementary School in Cantua Creek, California. Nestled deep in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, Cantua Creek is one of the poorest communities in the state—located in one of its most lucrative agricultural regions.

The residents of Cantua Creek had just been hit with three-fold water rate hikes, which would mean paying close to $300 a month for water the local health department had found to be contaminated with high levels of disinfection byproducts, leaving it undrinkable. And residents had just been told that their water would be shut off if they couldn’t pay the new rates. Jagannath, who was then working for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), was outraged.

“In California, water is the epitome of privilege,” Jagannath explained by e-mail. “At no point in this state’s history have rural residents—the people who do the work of growing, picking, and packing our agricultural commodities—had a say in where clean water should be directed. The odds have been stacked against small, local vegetable producers—and moreover against the health and safety of farmworkers—for the majority of California history.”

Standing around the local basketball court with colleagues from other farmworker advocacy organizations and environmental justice nonprofits, Jagannath realized an urgent need for these groups to come together strategically if they were to succeed in fighting the myriad injustices facing low-income farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley.

She got her wish. A year later, at just 26, Jagannath was hired to be the first coordinator of the San Joaquin Valley Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which she soon renamed the Community Alliance for Agroecology (CAFA). Now 28, Jagannath is known as a powerful advocate for farmworker rights, environmental justice, and political organizing in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

“Jagannath took the Alliance to a different level,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, and one of the Alliance’s founders. “Her focus became ‘How do we work with small farmers of color in the valley? How do we build a good agricultural system from the ground up?’”

For two years at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), Jagannath had worked one-on-one with farmworkers who had experienced pesticide exposure, harassment in the fields, and wage theft. She also worked on some larger environmental justice cases—like the episode in Cantua Creek—that were focused on communities’ access to fresh water.

In Cantua Creek, Jagannath worked alongside residents to secure subsidy funding from the state to defray their water bills, and arranged for state-funded bottled water to be delivered to each home (which is still happening to this day). Situations like the ones at Cantua Creek are symptoms of a larger illness, of course. Members of CAFA get farmworkers involved in building environmental justice solutions. For example, CAFA is currently advocating for legislation known as the Farmer Equity Act (AB 1348), which would give socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers increased access to environmental stewardship funds.

Formative Experiences in Farming

Jagannath’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from South India, settling in Mobile, Alabama, where Jagannath was born. Her dad worked at paper mills in the South, and Jagannath’s childhood was punctuated by moves from one rural mill town to another. Her parents divorced when she was five, and eventually her mom moved to Southern California, where she raised Jagannath and her brother.

I fell in love with agriculture there,” Jagannath said. “I grew up wanting to farm.”

Jagannath may have been destined for a career in farming—after all, Janaki is the Hindu goddess of agriculture. “Overall, she is a central character in Hindu faith representing the ecological cycles of the planet upon which agriculture, and all of life on earth, depend,” said Jagannath. But during college at the University of California, Davis, Jagannath spent her summers working at Chino Nojo, a diversified fruit and vegetable farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She harvested crops—from carrots to strawberries—alongside the field crew and also worked at the farm’s vegetable shop.

She remembers picking the season’s finest heirloom tomatoes and then slicing them for Alice Waters at the back of the shed so she could taste them before loading up crates for Chez Panisse. She also recalls picking golden raspberries in late summer for Wolfgang Puck, who would drive all the way to the farm from Spago in Los Angeles.“

Working at Chino Nojo opened her eyes to the need for more farms like it—those that provide long-term, stable work for farmworkers, and employers who see farming as a dignified occupation.

“I learned a lot of what I know about farming from one farmworker there, Rene Herrera, who has worked there for most of his life, and his father before him,” Jagannath said. “Those kinds of jobs are rare as a farmworker—because farms like the Chino family’s are equally rare and precious places.”

At UC Davis, Jagannath “got politicized,” she said. She discovered the vocabulary with which to explain the environmental downside of her dad’s jobs working at paper mills throughout the South—and learned about the concept of environmental justice.

At the Community Alliance for Agroecology, there are three main areas of work: policy advocacy (as with the Farmer Equity Act, or trying to establish a drinking water fund for rural residents paid for by Big Ag polluters), local agroecology organizing (such as holding farmer-to-farmer exchanges on agroecology and market enhancement), and building political power for systems change (they host trainings in the areas of food systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy and organizing). Right now, the organization’s biggest policy push is on the Farmer Equity Act, though the group has also been actively trying to get the state to channel some of the subsidies it grants to large dairies with methane digesters to “alternative manure-management strategies” like pasture-based dairies.

Promoting soil health is another major area of the Alliance’s focus. “Janaki knows all this information about soil health,” said Genoveva Islas, Program Director at Cultiva La Salud. “It really does help to highlight our connection back to the earth, and why it’s so important to preserve it.”

In addition to composting and manure management, CAFA is championing a practice known as orchard recycling. “Rather than growing an almond tree for 25 years and pulling it out and burning it in field, you take that material and blend it back into the soil,” explained Janaki. “We’re essentially trying to close the loop.”

But probably the most exciting part of CAFA’s work right now—especially in the Trump era—lies in developing a so-called “organizer academy” led by two United Farm Workers-trained organizers that will teach community members and farmworkers about food-systems history, campaign planning, communications, policy advocacy, and organizing. “The curriculum is taught in a way that’s evocative of the 1960s and 70s organizing strategies that were successful in winning some of the major battles for equity for farmworkers,” said Jagannath. So far, the pilot project has been for CAFA staff only, but Janaki envisions trainings for farmworkers in the near future.

“We can’t just advocate for reform and regulation,” Jagannath said. “Instead, we’re working on how to build political power amongst farmworker communities, to ensure our local and state elections have representation for communities of color who have been paying taxes but not receiving any of the benefits.”

Update: Jagannath will be attending UC Davis law school in the fall to study Environmental Law with a focus on agriculture and land use. CAFA is currently seeking a new coordinator.

31 July 2017

When Agnes Nyinawumuntu began her career as a coffee farmer two decades ago, she picked coffee “cherries" indiscriminately and with little care for quality. Back then, because she was selling her cherries to a middleman for a pittance — 250 Rwandan francs (about 30 U.S. cents) for 2 pounds of unwashed cherries — she had no incentive to select only the ripe, scarlet-colored cherries that create the best coffee.

Today, after three years of training in agronomy, cupping and roasting by the nonprofit Relationship Coffee Institute, Nyinawumuntu is paid nearly $2 a pound for her beans, and she is also the past president of the Twongere Umusaruro Cooperative in eastern Rwanda. She has become a respected figure in Rwanda’s coffee industry who is regularly asked to train other Rwandan coffee-growers in best agricultural practices. The money she has earned has lifted her family out of poverty — she was able to upgrade their earthen dwelling to a stucco house and purchase mattresses for herself and her husband and for each of their five children, as well as purchasing livestock and an additional plot of land for farming.

Over the last four years, the Relationship Coffee Institute has enrolled more than 14,000 female coffee farmers in Rwanda in its training, teaching them how to improve coffee quality throughout the growing and processing of the beans. The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a unique collaboration between a B Corp-certified coffee importer, Sustainable Harvest, and the nonprofit Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Improving economic opportunities for farmers like Nyinawumuntu is RCI’s reason for existing.

14 June 2017

In late February, I read an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof called "Trump Voters are Not the Enemy" that really resonated for me. Like everyone I know, I'd been struggling to understand how 62 million Americans could vote for someone who treats women so abysmally, stoops to racial slurs, and ridicules everyone from disabled people to Miss Universe. I realized there were other reasons Trump appealed to folks, of course, but I assumed that voting for him meant you also endorsed his worse traits.

Todd Nash, in a photo taken by Brown Cannon III for 1859 Magazine

Since agriculture is one of my beats, I went in search of farmers from my (and Kristof's) home state of Oregon. What I discovered is that Trump supporters have complicated feelings about him—even more so now that the new budget proposal makes such drastic cuts to the agriculture programs that really help farmers (some of the very people who helped elect him). But these farmers still hope he will deliver when it comes to getting rid of regulations. I think my favorite quote came from rancher Todd Nash, the Commissioner of Wallowa County out in Eastern Oregon, when I asked him if he had any reservations about Trump.

“His personality! His flippant comments! It was really tough for me to vote for somebody that was not respectful in a lot of ways,” said Nash. “During the campaign, every time he would say something that was so offensive, I kept saying, ‘Doggone it! Don’t make it so hard for me to vote for you!’” he recalled.

Read the whole four-part series, which was published in Oregon Business Magazine earlier this week.

09 May 2017

A few weeks ago, wine writer Katherine Cole invited me to be a panelist on her new podcast, the Four Top. On the podcast, which just won a James Beard media award, Katherine and three other food-world insiders (usually members of the media) talk about hot-button topics in the food and beverage culture. For this episode, Peter Platt of Andina restaurant, OPB reporter Roxy de La Torre, and I discussed Sanctuary Restaurants, undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry, and Peruvian cuisine. Have a listen here, and subscribe to the Four Top on iTunes!

01 May 2017

I've been traveling to Cabo for years with my mom and step-dad and every time we go, it seems, there are more restaurants touting their locally-grown, organic produce. Not only that, there are now at least three organic farms in the arroyo outside of San Jose that have restaurants. I write about these on-farm restaurants for the May issue of Food & Wine. (Available with a digital or print subscription here.)

Here's a tease:

It’s dusk and I’m sitting with my husband on a lush 16-acre organic farm, sipping a glass of cabernet when I notice that the tree brushing up against my arm is festooned with pomegranates. It’s only 5:30PM but already the open-air bar to my right is spilling over with glamorously-dressed Californians and Canadians nursing carrot margaritas and watermelon-mint-basil juleps served in Mason jars and a band on a stage made of hay bales is belting out Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Rows of arugula, beets, carrots, collards, and mizuna line the field behind us, foreshadowing the unforgettable meal we’re about to consume.

I’m not in my agriculturally-rich home state of Oregon. I’m at Flora Farms in San José del Cabo, Mexico. When I first started coming to Los Cabos 18 years ago, it was impossible to find organic produce anywhere, let alone on restaurant menus. The Cape of Baja, home to both Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, is arid and desert-like—I’d assumed it was inhospitable for farming.

Little did I know that in 1996, Gloria and Patrick Greene, expats from California, had quietly started growing organic vegetables on an estuary hidden behind the colonial town of San José. Back then, there was no marina and few people lived in the rural villages of Animas Bajas and La Choya; certainly no tourists drove out there. In fact, when it rained, the arroyo would flood, making these two villages—and the Greene’s yurt and farm—inaccessible. “When the arroyo used to run every summer, we’d be cut off for two to three days,” says Greene, laughing. (This was before the San José Marina—or the bridge to it—was built.)

Today, as we tour the farm with chef Guillermo Tellez, I marvel at how the whole Flora Farm enterprise has expanded since I first visited in 2012. The old growth mango grove, a magical spot for weddings and other events, now has its very own kitchen and a brand-new open-air rotisserie for grilling chickens. (Beets, wrapped in tinfoil, are roasted in the embers and served in a fabulous salad at dinner.) Owners of one of 10 culinary cottages— luxury straw bale homes—have access to a beautiful lap pool and hot tub, as well as unlimited organic vegetables and herbs. There’s even an on-site microbrewery, two clothing boutiques, and a brand-new spa and yoga center, complete with a barber shop and juice bar. “We are like our own little village,” says Tellez, whose hoop earrings and pointy salt-and-pepper goatee lend him a pirate-like vibe.

Wine glass in hand, I follow Tellez as he leads us past a wedding—the guests are mingling over cocktails in the mango grove—into his tiny meat cellar, where various cuts of heritage pigs dangle from strings. He’s justifiably proud of the kitchen’s ambitious charcuterie program, which yields dry-cured coppa, sopressata, and culatello (leg cut cured in a pig’s bladder). The cellar will soon double in size, he tells us, and a cheese cave is in the works. Right now, the staff milks six cows and makes their own butter, ricotta, and burrata. (The cave will allow Tellez to make cotija and other aged cheeses.)

Gloria’s motivation to start farming twenty years ago was simple: she had opened an organic restaurant in San José, and needed a ready supply of pesticide-free produce. The 10-acre plot of land that she and Patrick owned came with a mango orchard and a well. Though the soil wasn’t ideal for farming, the Greenes built it up with compost and cover-cropping. Within a few years, their flavor-packed vegetables were turning heads. Chef Charlie Trotter requested tomatoes and herbs for his restaurant at the One & Only Palmilla. Eventually, Trotter gave Gloria a wish list of heirloom varieties to grow: Black Krim and German pink tomatoes, Broad Windsor favas, nero di Toscana kale. Soon other area chefs were placing their orders.

Gloria had been hosting a farmers market and cooking classes on her property for years. In 2009, she began working with a local rancher to raise Spanish hogs, chickens, goats, and rabbits on a nearby ranch. She and Patrick opened Flora’s Field Kitchen the following year. The marina bridge, built that same year, made the journey to the farm easier, but it was still circuitous, via a steep, pothole-pocked dirt road. Nonetheless, guests arrived in droves. Even the likes of Thomas Keller and George Clooney were showing up for dinner. Today, the restaurant is so busy—they do breakfast, lunch, and dinner—that chef Tellez reserves all the farm’s produce, herbs, eggs, and meat for its own meal service, farm store, private events, and two markets.

Just-picked winter root vegetables for sale at Flora Farms

Flora’s Field Kitchen seems to have started a trend. A few miles to the west, chef-farmer Enrique Silva has been farming organically at Los Tamarindos since 2002, and opened an on-farm restaurant in 2011. And last year, Cameron Watt and Stuart McPherson, expats from Vancouver, B.C. snapped up a 25-acre site between Los Tamarindos and Flora Farms. But the farm-to-table ethos has also caught on throughout Los Cabos. All the best resort restaurants along the corridor—from brand-new Comal at Chileno Bay Resort to the restaurants at the One & Only Palmilla—source their produce from local farms and ranches. And every Saturday morning, San José’s boisterous Mercado Orgánico attracts locals and travelers who come for its farm-fresh eggs and produce, live music, yoga classes, and tasty Mexican fare like Tlacoyos and tamales.

17 March 2017

This explainer-style piece on grass-fed dairy was published in Organic Life last month but with all my travels this winter, I forgot to post it. ;-)

Petting a cow at Jon Bansen's pasture-based dairy in Monmouth

Most milk and beef sold in America today comes from cows that have been fed corn. It cheaply fattens the animals up, but because cows’ multi-compartmented stomachs can’t properly digest corn, it also makes them more susceptible to E. coli, a pathogenic bacteria that can spread to humans. The solution? The food cows were meant to survive on: grass.

Not only are grass-fed cows healthier, but their meat and milk are more nutritious than their cornfed counterparts. Grass-fed meat and dairy contain gobs more beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids, which may prevent dementia as well as heart disease. They’re also high in conjugated lineoleic acid (CLA), a healthy omega-6 that’s been shown to lessen symptoms of inflammatory disorders such as allergies and asthma. In well-managed grass-fed operations—where cows are regularly moved to fresh pasture—there’s an environmental boon, too. Their manure replenishes the soil, improving the quality of the forage growth, which in turn reduces erosion and water pollution.

As word of these benefits has gotten out, demand for grass-fed products has skyrocketed. That’s led to some shady advertising. All cattle are grass-fed until they get to the feedlot, and any producer can put the words “grass-fed” on their product. (The USDA’s woefully understaffed Food Safety and Inspection Service theoretically regulates grass-fed beef claims, but doesn’t have the resources to audit ranches, so it’s all on the honor system.) Luckily, there are a few reliable and strict grass-fed certifications out there.

29 August 2016

It’s 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning in late July, and 15 families are lined up outside SnowCap Community Charities in the Rockwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Many have been waiting for over an hour in hopes that they’ll get first dibs at this food pantry, which is the largest in the state, serving over 9,000 people a month. The old model was that food pantries gave clients a pre-packed box of food. But SnowCap, like an increasing number of food pantries across the U.S., allows clients to “shop” or choose for themselves what they want to eat. There are limitations on some items, and generally speaking, the earlier they arrive, the better the pickings.

Another reason clients arrive early is SnowCap’s impressive assortment of seasonal produce from local farms. Amongst the offerings on display today are enormous green zucchinis, pattypan squash, purple turnips, greenbeans, lettuce, mushrooms, onions, and cherries from a farm in the Columbia River Gorge. There are also huge bags of frozen diced carrots, with or without corn.

A willowy 33-year-old woman named Erin takes a five-pound clamshell container of luscious-looking cherries and tells me she has been a regular at SnowCap for a year. “I cook a lot,” she says. “I make an ‘end of the week soup’ using up whatever is left in the fridge.” She especially loves the squash, radishes, and tomatoes, when they’re available. What will she do with the cherries? “Eat them immediately!”

Mona, a thirty-something woman from Egypt, has loaded her cart with apples, cherries, and purple turnips. She spurns the zucchini and the summer squash—“I don’t like these!” she says, wrinkling her nose—but loads up on purple turnips, which she likes to pickle. “My children love them!” she says. Claw, a Burmese woman wearing dangly silver earrings and a sequined T-shirt, says she likes to fry up vegetables with onions and chiles and make a Pad Thai.

The bulk of the fresh produce at SnowCap comes from Farmers Ending Hunger, a group of 100-plus farmers across the state who donate a portion of their crops. “Growers get the idea of feeding hungry people,” says executive director John Burt. “They get that and they step up.”

Like other organizations that have been popping up around the country—from Farm to Food Pantry in Washington state to Michigan Agricultural Surplus Program—Farmers Ending Hunger aims to recover the imperfect or “ugly” produce for which farmers can’t get top dollar. However, instead of purchasing produce, Farmers Ending Hunger asks farmers to make a donation. The organization was founded in 2006 by agricultural engineer and president of IRZ Consulting, Fred Ziari, when he learned that Oregon was one of the hungriest states in America. (Ten years later, it still clocks in at Number 10 in the USDA’s ranking of least food-secure states.)

At the time, Ziari, who lives in the farm belt on the eastern side of Oregon, began having conversations with nearby farmers and ranchers, asking them if they’d donate some of their crops to the hungry. What started with 173,000 pounds of frozen peas from a handful of growers has blossomed into an organization that donated 4.2 million pounds of farm-fresh food to the Oregon Food Bank last year. Two million pounds were potatoes and 1 million was onions, but the remainder was comprised of a huge variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, local wheat, and even hamburger meat from an eastern Oregon ranch.

Erin, 33, loves fresh cherries and plans to eat these immediately

Growers range in size from a philanthropist in Hood River who has a two-acre pear orchard to Orchard View Cherries (the source of the cherries at SnowCap), which grows fruit on 2,400 acres in and around The Dalles.

This was the first year that Orchard View Cherries, a 4th generation family-owned orchard, gave to Farmers Ending Hunger. Thanks to a new high-tech Italian sorting machine called Unitec Cherry Vision 2 (yes, it photographs each individual cherry!), the cherries are efficiently sorted into two channels. Perfect, unblemished are sent abroad to Japan or Dubai or to U.S. chains like Whole Foods and Safeway. Those that are slightly misshaped or off-color either go to the Oregon Cherry Growers for processing (into a brine or Maraschino cherries) and s Farmers Ending Hunger.

“When you’re selling to the retail buyer, they want the cherries to look pretty well perfect,” explains owner Ken Bailey. “The machine can determine what is too soft to put into the pack for retail.” So even though the cherries destined for Farmers Ending Hunger look flawless to most mortals, they’ll only remain that way for a few days.

In many states, farmers find it cheaper to leave fruit in the field rather than pay for labor and transport costs. In Oregon, according to Burt, the vast majority of farms giving to Farmers Ending Hunger give produce that would otherwise be sold for good money.

“We try to generate stuff right out of harvest,” says Burt. “It comes right out of the line—no different than what you buy in the store.” So farms are, in effect, donating product as well as labor. But Farmers Ending Hunger makes it easy for farmers to say “yes,” because they often provide transport (via the Oregon Food Bank or OFB), packaging, and sometimes even volunteer labor.

During harvest, an OFB truck arrives at Orchard View Cherry once a week, delivering the cherries to the central warehouse in NE Portland within two hours. There, OFB volunteers pack the cherries into plastic clamshells (purchased by Farmers Ending Hunger), stack them into cardboard totes which are then sent out to a network of 21 regional food banks throughout the state. (From there, they may be delivered to smaller school or church pantries in each community.)

“Without these materials, it would have been very difficult to deliver the product to the regional food banks and agencies in a client-friendly pack size, without damaging the cherries,” explains Katie Pearmine, the Strategic Sourcing Manager at the Oregon Food Bank. “Food banks don’t typically have budget for this type of material, so this is actually what made it work.” The whole delivery process takes about 24 hours, from farm to food bank. The same routine happens with other perishable crops across the state.

All-told, Orchard View Cherry donated 85,000 pounds of hand-picked fruit to Farmers Ending Hunger this summer. But Bailey wouldn’t have done it without the urging of executive director John Burt. “We get so wrapped up in our harvest and activities,” says Bailey. In addition to buying the plastic clamshell containers, Farmers Ending Hunger makes it easy for farmers by filling out the paperwork and (via its relationship with the OFB) handling distribution. The farm also gets an Oregon state tax credit of 15 percent of the value of the fruit donated. (Labor costs are not factored into tax credit.) Farmers who donate can also get a federal deduction on their taxes.

Pearmine at Oregon Food Bank, who is also a former Farmers Ending Hunger board member, emphasizes that getting fresh produce to food insecure Oregonians—while not easy or cheap—has everything to do with the strategic partnership between farmers and processors, Farmers Ending Hunger, and the Oregon Food Bank.

“You ask a farmer to donate and they are like, ‘I don’t have access to cash.’ And then you say, ‘Where do you have excess in your food stream?’ or ‘What can you do that can help people in poverty the most?’ Those are the questions that John Burt asks farmers.”

18 August 2016

I've been wanting to write about Ecotrust's the Redd on Salmon ever since VP of Food and Farming Amanda Oborne explained the concept to me. I finally got my wish: my short article on the Redd appears in the September issue of Fast Company magazine.

Here's a longer version of the story:

The local food movement has reached a plateau. According to the latest census, Americans spend a mere $1.3 billion on local food via farmers markets and CSAs. (That’s a fraction the trillions we spend in the industrial food system). Though many midsized farmers and ranchers long to expand their reach, most don’t have the infrastructure, time, or staff to do so.

Environmental think tank Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon, may have the answer. After years of research on what the so-called “agriculture of the middle” needs to scale up, Ecotrust’s in-house food systems expert Amanda Oborne has helped spawn a new project. Called the Redd on Salmon Street, the two-building $23 million campus is part high-end food hall, part “food hub”—a central warehouse where farmers, ranchers, and other food producers can stash their product until it’s ready to be distributed. And because this is Portland, the food is not distributed via CO2-spewing trucks. Instead, a company called B-line employs cyclists to deliver product via a fleet of electric-assist trikes with refrigerated trailers that carry up to 700 pounds. The Redd (the term for the spawning ground of salmon) is poised to grow Oregon’s regional food economy from boutique to badass.

Food hubs are nothing new. In fact, there are roughly 350 food hubs across the U.S., according to the Wallace Center’s National Good Food Network. But the Redd is unique.

Most food hubs are run like nonprofits. The Redd is a for-profit business with equity investors. It has anchor tenants like the FoodCorps national headquarters, retail space (ground will break on the Redd “east” building in the fall), and production kitchens for value-added food businesses. These businesses, which pay market-rate rents, subsidize the less sexy behind-the-scenes storage and operations, which is run by B-line. Think of it as a mash-up of a real estate development, food hall, and traditional food hub.

At press time, B-line had already signed on 30 clients including Betsy’s Best Bars (vegan energy bars), Camas Country Mill (flour), Carman Ranch (grass-fed beef), OlyKraut (gourmet sauerkraut), Organically Grown Co. (produce), and Starvation Alley Farms (organic cranberries and juice). Here’s how it works: a company delivers its product to the Redd and stores it either in dry or cold storage. B-line riders repack products into a trailer and bike it around town from AirBnB’s corporate cafeteria to local grocery stores like New Seasons, and on to downtown restaurants like Higgins and Cafe Bijou. (The trikes have a 2.5 mile delivery radius.)

It’s hard to overstate how excited ranchers and fisherman are about the Redd’s 2,000 square feet of cold storage—half freezer space, half refrigeration. Oborne calls it “the beating heart of the entire campus.”

“It used to be that all the little guys would pull up at New Seasons in their Subarus or pick-ups, clogging up the dock doors,” says Oborne. “Now they bring their stuff to the Redd and it gets repacked for store-specific delivery.” Vendors love this because they don’t waste time making deliveries; New Seasons loves it because trikes can bike right into the packing area.

There’s nothing wrong with shopping at farmers markets, of course, but Oborne sees them as a point on the local food economy’s trajectory. “Farmers markets helped us wake up,” Oborne says. “Projects like the Redd will help us grow up.”

10 June 2016

Believe it or not, Haiti was once the largest coffee producer in the world. By the late 18th century, this small Caribbean nation was exporting half of the world’s supply of coffee. But over the intervening 200 years, political instability and an extreme lack of infrastructure made it hard for the country to compete in the global coffee market. During the U.S. embargo in the mid-‘90s, most coffee farmers, struggling to survive, began burning their trees to make charcoal—Haitians' only form of fuel—or ripping them out to plant staples like corn and beans.

A decade ago, a delegation from St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida, visited Port-de-Paix, in the Northwest department of Haiti. This small Catholic university has had a 36-year-long relationship with the Port-de-Paix diocese, and it has a long-term commitment to economic development in the region.

“It’s the poorest region of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” says Anthony Vinciguerra, director of the university’s Center of Community Engagement. It also happens to be one of Haiti’s oldest coffee growing regions, with heirloom Arabica coffee trees scattered about.

When Vinciguerra asked local church and community leaders how the university could support development in Port-de-Paix, the answer was clear: Farmers wanted help reviving their coffee industry.

“We didn't know beans about coffee!’” recalls Vinciguerra. But St. Thomas has a large population of Haitian students—many of whom study business, trade, and marketing. After an initial investment of $10,000 from a private donor, Vinciguerralaunched a student-run project that allowed students to get hands-on experience with commodity import marketing, sales, and direct trade.

The Cafèière et Cacouyere du Nord Ouest (COCANO) cooperative was born. Since then, over 200 students from disciplines ranging from international business to plant biology have worked on the project. “We even have science students who are trying to eradicate the coffee bean bore beetle with organic treatments and traps,” Vinciguerra says. Giving students these key jobs obviates the need for a coffee broker, which ensures more money for the farmers.

Crucial to the project’s success was finding roasters who could bring COCANO coffee to the global specialty coffee market. The Italian roaster Pascucci Torrefazione was the first to sign on, followed by Miami’s Panther Coffee.

Panther owner Joel Pollock, a former roaster from Stumptown, remembers his first cupping of COCANO coffee vividly.

But after showing farmers how to install drying racks (to get coffee up off the ground), and emphasizing the importance of processing coffee on the same day it’s picked, he’s seen vast improvements. The 2015 harvest, he says, was the best yet. “It’s got this sweet, chocolatey flavor with some acidity and some red fruit,” says Pollock. “It was miles ahead of the first cup I tasted.”

Before COCANO, farmers in Port-de-Paix had been earning a measly $0.60 per pound. But now, they get $3, $3.25, or $3.50 a pound, depending on the quality of their beans. (Pollock employs the “Direct Trade” model, which rewards farmers for quality by paying them well above the Fair Trade price of $2.20 a pound.)

Pulling farmers out of poverty via high-end specialty coffee is a compelling story, but Pollock, whose next cafe is opening in Miami’s Little Haiti, thinks the quality of the coffee should speak for itself. “You have all these people marketing Haitian coffee by tugging at people’s heartstrings,” he says. “We don’t want to make you feel bad about the plight of Haiti. We’re trying to make it so that if we go away, these people are still making killer coffee.”

21 January 2016

I wrote about dulse, a crimson sea vegetable that's got the umami of bacon and the nutritional punch of kale, for the February issue of Fast Company. No, dulse is not new. It's been a culinary staple in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and New Brunswick for centuries. But this particular strain, which is being grown in tanks on the Oregon Coast, grows super fast.

Will farmed dulse be a sustainable new crop for Oregon? After tasting it at Imperial, I sure hope so.

“Back in the late ‘90s, we were astonished by the number of vineyards that were going into the Willamette Valley with irrigation,” said Raney, who is the founding winemaker at revered Oregon winery Evesham Wood. The Willamette Valley, which gets 42 inches of rainfall a year, seemed like one place that you shouldn’t need to irrigate—or so believed Raney, who had worked on vineyards in Germany, where irrigation is frowned upon. John Paul of Cameron Winery in the nearby Dundee Hills adamantly agreed. Not only was the duo passionate about conserving water, they aspired to make complex, place-driven wines. In 2004, they formed a small collective of winemakers who spurn irrigation, relying on natural rainfall alone. They called it the Deep Roots Coalition, in honor of the way non-irrigated vines’ roots sink deep into the soil in search of moisture.

John Paul was finishing his postdoc in chemistry at UC Berkeley when he found himself drawn more to the wineries of Napa than to the lab. By 1984 he and his wife, Teri, had purchased a vineyard site in the Dundee Hills, and Cameron Winery was born. Since then, Paul has become one of the most revered winemakers in Oregon—his complex pinots, chardonnays, and Giuliano (a Friulian blend) enjoy a cult following. Still, Paul produces no more than 5,000 cases a year, 80 percent of which stay in Oregon. (He and his 14-year-old dog, Jackson Pollock, make the Portland deliveries themselves.) An outspoken critic of both irrigated vineyards and herbicides, Paul is also the founder of the Deep Roots Coalition, an organization that advocates for “dry-farmed” wines.

The pivotal moment came when I was assistant winemaker at Carneros Creek in Napa and I was sent to a tasting of Domaine Romanée-Conti wines: 1976 vintage. I still remember sitting down with these big Burgundy glasses, which I’d never experienced before, and just being completely blown away by the wine. And getting up from that tasting and going, “This is the wine I want to make.” I’d never had a wine like that before, because it was too expensive for me!

When we first put in the vineyard, the deer were wiping out the vines, so we installed an electric fence. I had planted the vineyard to be like a grand cru vineyard in Burgundy—I planted 20 different clones of pinot noir in a two-acre parcel. My wife came up with the name: Clos Electrique. It literally means “electric fence.”

To irrigate is to take away a critical component of the terroir. Our established vineyards are doing fine this summer because the vines are old and they have really deep roots—they send their roots deep in search for water and minerals and bring forth each year a wine that says, “This is Oregon fruit. It could be from no other region of the world.”

Russ Raney and I founded the Deep Roots Coalition in 2004. A lot of the talking heads in the industry were extolling the virtues of irrigation. We knew that it was wrong, and if you irrigated in France, for example, you would lose your appellation. So we formed the DRC, and now two dozen wineries are members. I think we’re starting to influence the conversation in a big way. I don’t think people understand: Vineyards use a huge amount of water. But I also don’t think they understand what irrigation physiologically does to the grapes. It’s why California wines have 15–16 percent alcohol. They wouldn’t be [so alcoholic] if they were dry-farmed.

Don Oman, founder of Pastaworks, turned me on to Italian wines. And then he got me to go to Italy with him several times. I fell in love with the wines of Friuli. I started growing Friulano at Clos Electrique when somebody showed up at the winery with a bunch of cuttings in the back of his pickup truck and said, “I bet you would like these.” The new Giuliano is totally amazing. It’s exactly what I want to be making: 40 percent Friulano. It’s got this grapefruit-rind thing in the mouth.

Dijon clones are planted up and down the Willamette Valley for both pinot noir and chardonnay. I think that’s a huge mistake. They just don’t make very good wine! They’re bred for production, not for quality. Obviously people who have Dijon clones would argue all day with me that that’s not true. But in my opinion, Dijon clones make inferior wines in most cases, on the same soil type, than the clones that were here before them: Pommard and Wädenswil.

My kids are now 28 and 33. Julian, at 28, has become a complete wine geek. He designs my labels, and he loves to talk with me about how I’m making the wine. But I don’t think he has any aspirations to make wine—although recently he asked if he could come up and work harvest. You know what? You just never know.

03 August 2015

Sofresh Farms, in Canby, Oregon, is not what I expect. When I finally find it, on an out-of-the-way gravel road, I’m struck by how ordinary this rural neighborhood is. There’s a produce farm on one side; a man raising Longhorn cattle on the other. Magnificent Mount Hood dominates the skyline. Other than the 8-foot-high wooden fence surrounding the property, there’s nothing to tip me off that this is a cannabis farm.

Further complicating my notion of a typical pot farm, I’m met at the gate by a tow-headed three-year-old boy wearing silver wings. “Do you know where Tyson is?” I ask, mentioning the grower by name. The boy looks at me skeptically until I introduce myself.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Theo,” he says.

After texting Tyson again, I ask Theo if he might be able to help me locate him. He opens the gate, offers me his tiny hand, and leads me down a flagstone path to a greenhouse.

Tyson Haworth, a freckled 36-year-old farmer emerges from the greenhouse, wearing sunglasses and a worn Sofresh T-shirt. “I see you’ve met my son,” Haworth says, chuckling. As he shows me where to park, Haworth says he loves farming cannabis right where he lives.

“My kids will never know that pot was illegal,” he says.

Tyson Haworth at Sofresh Farms

Like many who have been growing for the medical marijuana market in Oregon, Haworth is over-the-moon that the state legalized recreational use of the drug last fall. He’s on a mission to destigmatize cannabis. “Marijuana was used for millennia,” he tells me, noting that the Chinese have long prescribed the plant for medicinal purposes. “And it was in the U.S. Pharmacopeia until 1942!” But he’s also on a mission to prove to other cannabis growers that you can successfully grow pot using agroecological farming methods.

“I’ve got little kids! I don’t want toxic chemicals around,” says Haworth, who intersperses his rapid-fire facts about cannabis farming with quotes from organic pioneer Elliot Coleman and organic soil guru Jeff Lowenfells. Though Haworth’s farm will never be USDA-certified organic (that is, until marijuana is legalized at the federal level), it is verified by Clean Green Certified, one of the only third-party certifiers to hold cannabis farmers to national and international organic standards.

The Making of an Eco-Label

If you smoke a joint, you’re not just inhaling THC and other cannabinoids. You’re also likely breathing in dangerous neurotoxins and cancer-causing chemicals.

Now that recreational marijuana is legal in four states—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—a dirty little secret about the pot industry has surfaced. Pot growers—especially those who cultivate plants indoors—rely heavily on pesticides.

A host of pests and other plagues can devastate cannabis crops: spider mites, root aphids, mosaic virus, and downy mildew are just a handful. Many cannabis farmers tend to turn to insecticides and other chemicals as a quick fix.

“Whether it’s medical or adult recreational use, you need to be concerned with the manner in which it’s grown, because you’re ingesting it,” cautions Van Hook. The way it’s ingested matters too; preliminary studies show that marijuana concentrates like oil and hash contain much higher pesticide residue levels than buds.

Pesticides aren’t the only problem, either. A new paper in the journal Bioscience documents the environmental havoc wreaked by illegal marijuana farming in California. In an interview with Yale 360, the paper’s author talks about the way these farms “siphon off scarce water resources, poison wildlife, erode fragile soils, and overload waters with nutrients.”

Van Hook founded Clean Green Certified a decade ago. A U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited organic certifier as well as a lawyer, Van Hook has worked in agriculture and aquaculture his whole life. In 2003, Van Hook was approached by a grower who wanted him to certify her cannabis as USDA organic. Van Hook explained that he couldn’t do that with a crop that is still illegal at the federal level, but the grower argued that there was a need for third-party certification. Van Hook discovered he could use U.S. and international organic standards to certify cannabis as long as he and certified growers don’t use the word “organic” or “USDA organic” to describe their product. Clean Green was born.

Before growers can become Clean Green certified, they must fill out an application with details about water use and energy use; soil erosion prevention; and how they plan to combat pests, weeds, and diseases. Clean Green inspects each farm annually, reviewing the farm’s inputs—from fertilizers and potting soils to sprays. Finally, the company tests the soil for 75 compounds at a federally licensed agricultural lab. (As Noelle Crombie at the Oregonianrecently reported, unlicensed labs tend to have inconsistent practices and can produce inaccurate results.)

To be Clean Green certified, you must also have a carbon reduction plan in place, whether that means buying renewable energy and using more efficient lighting or locating your dispensary close to your grow operation to cut down on transportation-related emissions.

“People in educated urban areas need to bring the same attention to the cannabis industry that they bring to their food and to their shade-grown, bird-friendly organic coffee. And they need to do it this year!” Van Hook says, a note of impatience creeping into his voice.

It seems some already are. To date, Van Hook has certified nearly 100 growers, processors, and handlers and says he’s seen an uptick in applications since Oregon legalized marijuana. Tyson Haworth at Sofresh Farms is one of them.

The greenhouse at Sofresh Farms

From Fish Oil to Beneficial Bugs: Taking it to the Next Level

Haworth came to cannabis farming via organic agriculture. He worked for the produce distribution company Organically Grown Co. for 13 years before starting an indoor tomato farm. But it wasn’t until his wife Michelle had her second back surgery that the couple started to grow marijuana. Michelle was hesitant to take the opiates her doctor prescribed because she feared addiction. Smoking pot gave her immediate relief from the incessant pain. Eventually, realizing he could earn much more growing medical marijuana than he could growing off-season tomatoes, Haworth started Sofresh in 2012. There was no question that he’d farm cannabis using organic practices.

This summer, Haworth is growing outdoors for the first time. The plants will grow to be nine feet wide and twelve feet tall. Although Haworth still cultivates some plants indoors, he doesn’t think it’s the future—especially now that pot is legal in Oregon.

“It’s harder to control pests indoors,” says Haworth. “You have to play mother nature. And she’s very good at her job.”

Soil health is of critical importance to Haworth. First, he puts down a layer of straw, then a layer of soil mixed with biochar, a soil amendment akin to what you’d find in an old growth forest. Then he adds a layer of compost or worm castings and then a final layer of straw. Finally, the soil and the plants are inoculated with mycorrhizae, which creates an intelligent food highway underneath the roots.

Sofresh is also one of the only cannabis farms in the U.S. that practices no-till agriculture. In its small 600 square-foot grow room (formerly a horse barn), I’m surprised to see wooden planks between the rows of impressively flowering Nuken, Black Betty, and Sweet Tooth—the strain that won the Amsterdam Cannabis Cup in 2001. Tattooed workers balance on the planks as they thin the canopy, so as not to disturb the soil.

“It’s important that there’s no compaction,” explains Haworth as he shows me around. “Lack of moisture and compaction are what kill the soil.” After harvest, the workers cut the plants and leave the stem to decay into the soil. Where other farmers apply myclobutanil, Haworth keeps mildew and mold at bay with fans and a large dehumidifier, and keeps the plants thinned for better air flow.

Haworth and his staff also spray the cannabis leaves with a compost-and-roasted-eggshell-tea, which is high in calcium, explains farm manager Missy LaGuardia. Calcium deficiencies can make cannabis plants more susceptible to pests. LaGuardia keeps the plant moist by spraying a mixture of aloe and fish oil on the leaves. “It mimics a really healthy mid-summer rain,” says LaGuardia, who usually sprays it at night.

LaGuardia says they populate the farm with ladybugs as soon as they see signs of aphids. Outdoors, natural predators like tree frogs and mice do their share of work, though LaGuardia admits they also eat the beneficial bugs.

The ladybugs released indoors are smart: Unless there’s a sustained source of food, they’ll escape. So LaGuardia keeps what she calls a “ladybug altar” in one corner of the greenhouse—a decomposing cannabis plant rife with aphids. She points out little orange clusters. “These are ladybug eggs!” she says, smiling triumphantly. I gasp, wondering if a conventional pot farmer would ever take such a risk. “Aren’t you worried this will lead to an aphid outbreak?” She shrugs her shoulders. “You’ve got to leave a little for nature.”

10 April 2015

If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with craft bakeries, particularly my local one in Portland: Tabor Bread. The baker at Tabor makes a sprouted grain and seed loaf with red fife flour grown in the Willamette Valley that's got a nutty flavor with caramel notes and a hint of sour. It's perfect as toast, slathered with butter, but also makes an excellent sandwich bread.

I wrote a short piece in this month's Hemispheres magazine about the trend of bakers sourcing heirloom grains and milling them in-house with stone mills (which preserves both the nutrition and the flavor of the grain.)

behind the scenes at Portland's Tabor Bread

Bucking the gluten-free trend, heirloom grains and real bread make a comeback

A gluten-free craze has taken the nation by storm. But there’s also been an equally strong—though less publicized—pro-grain movement. Across the country, craft bakers have shown a renewed interest in heirloom wheat and rye varieties, each of which boasts a unique flavor profile that speaks to its rich history and local agricultural influences. Think of it as grain terroir.

Many of the wheats currently seeing a resurgence were once grown abundantly in America but fell out of favor in the late 1800s with the advent of roller mills, which efficiently remove the bran and the germ to make white flour. The problem? The germ tastes great. “The germ is not only where the nutrients and fatty acids are, it’s the flavor center,” says David Bauer, owner and baker at Farm & Sparrow Bakery in Asheville, North Carolina. He grinds his heirloom grains with a stone mill to preserve both the bran and the germ.

Bauer first came across Wren’s Abruzzi rye—an Italian cultivar that came to U.S. shores through Charleston during the colonial era—in a Virginia field, where it was being used (unceremoniously) to suppress weeds. “He was cover-cropping his fields with it!” Bauer says of the land’s farmer, sounding scandalized. Softer than the German rye typically grown in the U.S., this variety boasts a rich umami flavor, which Bauer describes as “bright and spicy.” It’s become a favorite in his seeded rye breads at Farm & Sparrow, and he uses it in his rye-cacao shortbread at All Souls Pizza, the Asheville pizzeria he co-owns with a local chef.

Red Fife, another ancient grain, came from Ukraine to Canada via a Scottish immigrant in the mid-1800s and is now making a comeback in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where farmer Tom Hunton at Camas Country Mill is growing it to the delight of area bakers and bread lovers. Herbaceous and nutty, with caramel notes, Red Fife has become a hit at Portland’s Tabor Bread, where it’s used in toothsome loaves like the popular sprouted grain and seed. “It’s really mild and slightly sweet,” says baker Brad Holderfield. “It doesn’t have a bitter quality the way a lot of red wheat does.”

At San Francisco’s The Mill, the aptly named Josey Baker has developed an obsession for einkorn (German for “single grain”), a grassy, nutty variety that ranks as the world’s oldest wheat cultivar; farmers were probably growing it more than 10,000 years ago. Those original farmers seem to have been onto something: Not only is the variety more nutritious than modern wheats (it’s higher in protein and beta-carotene), but einkorn also contains—for people who care about such things—less gluten. “It’s like you took a loaf of adolescent Wonder Bread and let it mature into a fully developed and nuanced version of itself,” Baker says. Although The Mill’s einkorn bread is made of only water, salt, sourdough starter and whole-grain flour, it comes out of the oven smelling like honey. “It’s my favorite bread we’re making now.”

12 March 2015

I got to write about superstar organic plant breeder Frank Morton for Communal Table, a new literary and food publication created by the talented Adrian Hale. Here's a teaser, below, but you can read the whole article here.

When I moved to Portland four years ago and began frequenting the farmers’ market, it didn’t take me long to become obsessed with Gathering Together Farm’s vegetables. The farm’s stand drew me in with its bounty and its kaleidoscope of color: crisp peppers in green, red, yellow, and purple; fragrant bundles of fresh basil; and singular specimens that I’d never seen before, like watermelon radish and delicata “zeppelin” squash. But it was the lettuce—hulking heads of it, bursting with uncommon vigor—and several types of kale (not just lacinato but White Russian and a frilly magenta-stemmed kale called Red Ursa) that stopped me in my tracks and caused me to exclaim out loud to complete strangers.

Before I ever tasted a nibble of lettuce, I knew Gathering Together Farm was special. What I didn’t know until recently was why some of the farm’s most popular vegetables are unique and uniquely tasty.

The wild salad mix, the kale, and the delicata can all be traced directly to one maverick plant breeder named Frank Morton. Little known to the general public, Morton is a rock star in plant breeding circles. A seed saver who grows heirloom plants that are at risk of extinction, Morton is also an organic plant breeder who creates never-before-seen varieties that have improved yield and disease resistance as well as culinary attributes such as texture, color, and enhanced flavor. He’s also an indefatigable activist who sued the USDA in 2008 for failure to require an environmental impact assessment before Roundup Ready sugar beets were introduced in the Willamette Valley.

Plant breeders have been overlooked in the local food movement, but they shouldn’t be. Without them, we wouldn’t have any heirloom tomatoes to delight over at our farmers’ markets or improved varieties like Frank Morton’s addictive Stocky Red Roaster sweet peppers. “Breeders are architects . . . the people writing the original recipes,” says chef Dan Barber in The Third Plate. The type of breeding that makes headlines these days is genetic engineering, a technology introduced in the 1980s that involves splicing DNA from one plant or animal into an entirely different plant. (“Golden rice,” for instance, is endowed with a gene from corn and a gene from a soil bacterium.) But what Frank Morton practices is old-fashioned Mendelian crossbreeding, which humans have used for thousands of years. He crosses a plant that has a trait he likes—say, Merlot lettuce, which is resistant to downy mildew—with another plant he also likes—say, Reine d’ Glaces lettuce, which has dark-green lacy leaves and is crispy and sweet—then saves the seeds from this union and plants those the following season.

23 February 2015

Last fall, after wondering for years about whether I should buy produce from farmers who claim that they are “organic, but not certified,” I dug into some big questions about certification. That process led me to explore many other seemingly respectable food labels that—while much less popular than organic—seemed to offer a similar, if slightly different level of transparency between eaters and farmers.

Back in 2002, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched its National Organic Program (NOP), sustainably minded farmers around the U.S. rejoiced. But a handful of farmers from New York’s Hudson Valley were less enthusiastic. Though they were committed to organic practices, they weren’t convinced that the USDA program was an ideal fit—especially considering the cost and paperwork involved.

So they formed a grassroots nonprofit called Certified Naturally Grown (CNG), with its own set of standards and a certification process to go with them. “They felt organic [certification] was better suited to larger operations and wholesale channels where there wasn’t that connection between the farmer and the eater,” explains Alice Varon, Executive Director of CNG.

The CNG standards are based on the organic standards; they don’t allow synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or GMO seeds, and they require crop rotation and soil amendments. But the program is broader in its scope. Since 2010, it has covered not only produce farmers and livestock producers, but beekeepers as well. (The USDA does have organic standards for apiculture in the works, but they aren’t scheduled to hit the market until 2016.) CNG is also in the process of developing standards for aquaponics and mushroom cultivation.

CNG involves much less paperwork than the USDA organic program—at a more reasonable cost. That’s in part because the organization employs a peer-review inspection process: Each annual on-farm inspection is done by another CNG farmer. For free. In fact, all certified farms must inspect at least one other farm.

“A lot of farmers are drawn to our peer-review inspection process,” says Varon. “They feel a great deal of ownership in it. And it gives them a chance to connect with one another.”

They’re also drawn to the lower certification cost. While USDA organic certification can be prohibitive for small-scale operations (as much as $1,000 a year, depending on the size), CNG has a sliding scale that starts at $100 per year. CNG also has a scholarship fund for beginning farmers or those who have suffered unusual difficulties such as extreme weather or physical injury.

Farmer Rick Reddaway, who has a “petite” vegetable farm in Orient, Oregon, grew weary of telling his farmers’ markets customers, “No, I’m not certified organic, but I do grow everything without pesticides or herbicides.” Wanting some accountability, he chose CNG both for its lower cost and because it doesn’t require conventionally farmed land go through a three-year transition period before it can get be certified.

The CNG application asks farmers if any prohibited pesticides or herbicides have been used on their fields over the past three years. If the answer is yes, CNG will allow a farmer to have “CNG transitional status” as she transitions her farm from conventional to organic. Reddaway was able to get full CNG certification because the East Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District, which owns his land, told him it had been fallow for three years.

“I’m in an incubator program on land that I’ll soon have to leave, so it just didn’t make sense for me to do USDA organic certification,” says Reddaway.

Farmer Rashid Nuri, who runs an urban farm in Atlanta, Georgia called Truly Living Well, says USDA organic standards were much too onerous for him. “I have multiple farm sites and 10 years ago, each site had to have its own documents to be certified organic,” says Nuri. Though this rule has since changed, Nuri is a loyal member of CNG.

To make certification as transparent to consumers as possible, the grower’s complete application is posted on the CNG website, as is the last date of inspection and the name of the certifying farmer. “We take comfort in the fact that our website is completely up-to-date,” says Varon. When she gets the occasional call from a consumer saying that a farmer using the CNG logo isn’t up on the CNG site, Varon sends the farmer a letter.

So why would one choose CNG produce over organic? Since CNG is tailored to direct-market farmers, the CNG label typically means your produce is coming from a local farm. Though some organic produce comes from local farms as well, much of the organic produce you find at Whole Foods or Walmart has been shipped from great distances. Organic, in other words, does not always mean small, community-supported farms. CNG produce may also be less expensive than certified organic, though it depends on where the farmer is located and the scale of her operation.

On the down side for farmers, Certified Naturally Grown doesn’t have anywhere near the name recognition of the certified organic label, nor is it as ubiquitous. But since 2002, membership has been steadily climbing, mostly via word-of-mouth. CNG has 740 certified farms and apiaries in the U.S. The highest concentration of CNG-certified farms is in the Southeast, with a preponderance of them in Georgia.

Varon thinks that’s because organic never developed a strong foothold in the Southeast. “There wasn’t this sense that organic is the only game in town,” says Varon. “And certainly, in the South, you have a resistance to government-run programs!”

Food Alliance

While the organic standards are seen as relatively stringent by many, they are notoriously lacking when it comes to labor and and animal welfare standards. And some farmers believe they could have a wider environmental scope as well. That’s where the Food Alliance label comes in.

When Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming began selling Shepherd’s Grain flour in 2003, they went with Food Alliance because its standards went “beyond organic.”

“What appealed to us was Food Alliance’s broader and deeper look at agriculture and food in general,” says Shepard’s Grain General Manager Mike Moran. Like organic growers, Food Alliance-certified farmers cannot grow genetically modified seeds or use high-toxicity pesticides, and they must also practice integrated pest management, an ecosystem-based approach.

But in addition, Food Alliance farmers must practice soil and water conservation, wildlife habitat and biodiversity conservation, and prove that they’re offering safe and fair working conditions for employees. That last part means having a grievance procedure, a nondiscrimination policy, and offering benefits like health insurance and bonuses, among other things.

In addition to crops, Food Alliance has standards for livestock operations, shellfish farms, nurseries and greenhouses, and even food handling operations. “This appealed to us because you can certify that everybody who touches your product is aligned to the same philosophy,” says Moran. So, not only do all 38 farmer-owners at Shepherd’s Grain have to be certified, but the Old Centennial Mill in Spokane, Washington, owned by ADM, has to be certified as well.

Food Alliance was founded in 1998—four years before any national organic standards existed. The organization doesn’t forbid the use of all synthetic pesticides and herbicides, but it does ban all chemicals that the World Health Organization classifies as “extremely hazardous” and “highly hazardous.” This means that chemicals like glyphosate and diuron (both classified by the WHO as only “slightly hazardous”) are permitted. However, executive director Matthew Buck says the organization’s focus on Integrated Pest Management is meant to reduce if not eliminate the need for chemical applications.

“Our strategy is to first prevent the problem so no treatments are necessary,” says Buck. “Use of chemical treatment is absolutely your last resort—if you’re going to lose the crop and your livelihood.”

Some farmers prefer this because it gives them wiggle-room if they can’t use IPM to suppress a pest that’s decimating their crop. FA also allows farmers some leeway on chemical fertilizer applications (unlike organic), but the hope is that using cover-cropping, on-site composting, and integrating livestock into crop production will prod farmers to use much less commercial fertilizers.

Food Alliance’s inspection is not as affordable as CNG’s, but that’s because Food Alliance works with a third-party auditor, International Certification Services. The inspection fee ranges from $600-$1,100 for three years, which works out to around $200-$350 per year. (There is also an annual licensing fee, based on a percentage of gross sales, that’s paid directly to Food Alliance.)

For farmers, there are trade-offs. Buck likes to use the example of an organic wheat grower, who creates a risk of erosion every time he or she tills the ground. (Most organic wheat farmers rely on tillage to prevent weed growth.) A Food Alliance-certified wheat grower, on the other hand, can “direct-seed” with minute amounts of chemical fertilizer and they don’t need to take as many passes through the fields. Not only are they conserving oil, they’re building organic soil matter and sequestering carbon. “I think there are many benefits to organic agriculture and it represents an improvement over ‘conventional,’ but I don’t think organic is the paragon of sustainable agriculture,” says Buck.

Margaret Reeves, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, supports organic because of the integrity of the label. But she understands the appeal of Food Alliance. “I have visited some of the big organic farms, that for all intents and purposes look pretty darn conventional, except they don’t use the disallowed products,” says Reeves. “Food Alliance goes beyond that by offering the environmental stewardship parts that organic does not.” Reeves has also been involved in the creation of a new business-to-business certification process called the Equitable Food Initiative, which is aimed at protecting farmworkers from pesticide exposure and abusive working conditions.

So what’s a conscientious consumer to do? Luckily, it’s not usually a choice between one sustainable label and the other. Usually—whether you’re at the farmers’ market, food co-op or the grocery store—you’re deciding between a conventional apple and and an organic apple or a conventional apple and a CNG apple.“There really are complimentary efforts out there,” says Reeves. “It comes down to what’s available.”

26 January 2015

A series of books over the past decade has extolled the environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture and how delicious it can taste. Michael Pollan's groundbreaking “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” popularized grass-fed beef and eggs from pastured chickens. Dan Barber’s “The Third Plate” celebrates free-range foie gras and heirloom wheat. But no writer has devoted a whole book to the lowly lentil. Until now.

In “Lentil Underground,” Liz Carlisle (a Pollan protégé and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Diversified Farming Systems) elevates the oft-ignored legume to heroic game-changer. In the late 1980s, a scrappy group of four Montana farmers discover that “this Robin Hood of the dryland prairie” robs fertility from aboveground, sharing it freely in the soil. Lentils are what agroecologist Miguel Altieri call a “green manure” — they fix nitrogen in the soil, obviating the need for chemical fertilizers. The farmers, already disenchanted with the fossil-fuel-based grain monoculture of the Great Plains — which not only depletes the soil of nitrogen but also offers razor-slim profit margins — form a company called Timeless Seeds.

Today, it’s not unusual to find farmers who spurn herbicides and chemical fertilizers and employ a diverse rotation of crops. But back in 1987, when David Oien and three others launched Timeless, wheat was king in Montana. “Amber waves of grain were like a religion in this part of the west,” Carlisle writes. “Any other plant life was labeled a weed and taken as a sign of some deep character flaw.” Puzzled by their unkempt fields of black medic (another potent nitrogen-fixer that some might call a weed), wheat farmers ridiculed their lentil-growing neighbors, calling them “a bunch of damn weed farmers!”

Carlisle embeds herself with these pioneering organic growers — sometimes even waking up for breakfast at their farms — and chronicles their setbacks and successes. It’s a typical story of being ahead of the curve. In the late ’80s, Oien and his fellow lentil farmers struggled to make a profit. But by the mid-’90s, lentils — especially the French green lentils and Black Belugas that Timeless grows — were increasingly in demand at natural food stores and high-end restaurants. Timeless got lucrative contracts with Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, both of which amped up production and profits, and chefs at high-end restaurants promised to put Black Belugas on every plate.

Along the way, Carlisle introduces us to memorable characters who subvert the stereotype of the laconic, corn-fed middle American farmer. Oien, a long-haired idealist who studied religion in college, signs official documents with a peace sign. Casey Bailey, 32, practices yoga, sings arias as he runs a tractor, and is “the sole Timeless farmer who had been to both a major Occupy protest and countercultural mecca Esalen.” Then there are Tuna McAlpine, a pro-gun libertarian who becomes an outspoken advocate for organic farming, and Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree a veteran organic inspector and a sustainable operations director for a federal agency, respectively. (They farm on the weekends.)

Carlisle is a clear and vivid writer. The founders of Timeless Seeds are “audacity rich, but capital poor.” She describes one lentil farmer’s “bearish” arms as “more like verbs than nouns.” And her pithy explanations of nitrogen-fixing plants, no-till agriculture, and why industrial agriculture is ruinous for both farmers and the environment are good primers for anyone just starting to learn about sustainable agriculture. However, sometimes her chronological history of the lentil underground feels rote. And more than once she takes readers into the weeds (pun intended), with lengthy backgrounds on two Montana nonprofits.

But overall, hers is an important contribution to the sustainable agricultural genre. Carlisle unearths some unusual agroecological practices that should gain a foothold in mainstream farming, such as “undersowing” — the idea of planting a “green manure” crop (such as medic) and a grain crop simultaneously, so as to boost fertility and increase yield of the primary cash crop without waiting a full year in between. She also tells the fascinating lineage of the black Indianhead lentil, which almost sank into obscurity until an heirloom bean buyer named Lola rechristened it Black Beluga because of their “inky resemblance to high-end caviar.”

Most importantly, Carlisle offers a vision of an alternative future. At a time when fertilizer run-off from industrial farms and feedlots alike is creating “dead zones” bigger than the state of Connecticut, and herbicide-resistant superweeds are proliferating at an alarming rate, America needs a resilient farming system like the one created by Montana’s lentil underground.

Will lentils change the world? They aren’t magic beans, Carlisle cautions. But they’re lower on the food chain — not to mention more affordable — than grass-fed beef or free-range foie gras. When I finished “Lentil Underground,” the first thing I did was go onto Timeless Seed’s website to locate a store near my home in Portland where I can buy their Black Belugas. I’m already planning my first meal: coconut-oil simmered kale with red peppers, Black Belugas and roasted squash.

17 December 2014

Each winter, tens of millions of Americans buy and decorate Christmas trees. Yet few of us think about what it takes to keep these trees looking so healthy and lush.

For most growers, it takes pesticides–and lots of them. It turns out that the majority of Christmas tree farms are plagued with destructive pests and noxious weeds that suck nutrients and moisture from the soil, leaving young trees sickly and ugly. As a result, the Christmas tree industry has become dependent on chemicals of all sorts. Most Christmas tree growers regularly spray Roundup and other herbicides to control noxious weeds and Lorsban—an organophospate insecticide that has been linked to nervous system damage, among other things—to kill aphids, which damage trees by yellowing foliage and stunting growth. Growers also use fungicides to control diseases.

We don’t eat our Christmas trees, but we do live with them in our homes for a few weeks at a time. Should we be worried that our children or pets are being exposed to residual chemicals?

Though no studies have been conducted to see if Christmas trees still have pesticides on them at harvest, Chal Landgren, a Christmas tree specialist at Oregon State University’s Department of Horticulture, says the amount of residue still on the tree by the time it gets to your house is minor.

That’s because most pesticides are sprayed in the spring or summer, so by the time December comes around, they’ve been broken down by the elements. According to Jeffrey Jenkins, Ph.D., an environmental toxicologist and professor at Oregon State University, every pesticide label also has a “pre-harvest interval” on it telling farmers when they can apply their last spray before harvest. “These products have been evaluated by the EPA and they have a very long and involved process for evaluating potential impacts on human health,” says Jenkins.

Even if consumers aren’t being exposed to these chemicals, it’s still a worthy goal to reduce their use on Christmas tree farms–both to minimize workers’ exposure and to curtail the amount of toxic chemicals that trickle into our rivers and oceans, threatening the health of aquatic life.

Oregon is the largest Christmas tree producer in the nation. Over 6 million trees are harvested in the state every year, and they are shipped all over the world—from Hawaii and New York City to Mexico. In fact, one reason Christmas tree farmers use so many pesticides is because countries like Mexico strictly enforce rules banning pests on imports. (Hawaii, which just received a shipment of about 200,000 Oregon trees, is similarly strict.) Though no one knows how many pesticides the state’s Christmas tree industry uses—funding for a program requiring reporting was cut in 2008—over 500 pesticide labels are registered for use by the Oregon Christmas tree industry.

Exactly how much pesticide from Christmas tree farms is ending up in Oregon’s rivers and streams is unknown. But The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has been monitoring pesticide levels in the Clackamas River annually since 2005 and has found many toxic pesticides at levels exceeding EPA benchmarks. Among the most worrying, according to DEQ’s toxics coordinator Kevin Masterson, are chlorpyrifos (Lorsban), bifenthrin (Brigade), and chlorothalonil (Bravo Weather Stik). At least two of these—chlorpyrifos and chlorothalonil—are used by the Christmas tree industry, which is concentrated along the Clackamas River watershed. Not only does the Clackamas River provide drinking water for over 300,000 Oregonians, it’s a wild salmon stronghold and supports populations of winter steelhead, cutthroat trout, and lamprey.

Fortunately, two new Oregon programs are underway that teach Christmas tree growers how to reduce chemical use by practicing integrated pest management.

Last year, an interagency team called the Clackamas Basin Pesticide Stewardship Partnership was awarded state funding to work with the two biggest agriculture sectors along the Clackamas River: nurseries and Christmas tree farms. The Partnership—which is comprised of the Oregon Environmental Council, Oregon State University (OSU), and the Clackamas County Soil and Water Conservation District, among other groups—has focused on educating growers about how to reduce pesticide use, risk, and runoff. Over the past year, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) experts at OSU have designed pesticide risk reduction trainings, including a beneficial insect workshop for Christmas tree farmers. (There will be another training this February.)

These workshops give growers who do want to phase out pesticides the tools to do so. But they probably won’t phase them out entirely, admits Allison Hensey, program director for agriculture and watersheds at the Oregon Environmental Council. “Christmas tree customers demand a perfect-looking product,” she wrote via e-mail. “This means growers have to find highly effective pest control methods to avoid aesthetic damage to their crops.”

The other program is Socially and Environmentally Responsible Farm (SERF), a certification tool for sustainable Christmas tree farms that Landgren helped launch. Founded in 2011, SERF requires farms to prove they have a robust sustainability plan, with active programs in five areas: biodiversity, integrated pest management, soil and water conservation, worker safety, and farm stewardship. A SERF-certified Christmas tree isn’t 100 percent pesticide-free, but if you buy a tree with the SERF logo, you can be sure the farm is working to reduce its use of toxic chemicals and prevent soil erosion. So far, the program—which certifies only Oregon and Washington farms—has certified four farms. (If you can’t find a SERF-certified tree near you, Certified Naturally Grown has certified one Christmas tree farm in North Carolina and there are six USDA organic Christmas tree farms).

Straw water bars at Noble Mountain in Salem

Noble Mountain, a 4,000-acre Christmas tree farm in Salem, Oregon, was one of the first to apply for certification. “We’ve always tried to do what’s right for the ground and the soil—it’s our livelihood,” says farmer and General Manager Bob Schaefer. Back in 1985, Schaefer introduced “straw water bars”—bales of straw placed strategically along the hillside to reduce erosion (see photo above). He also discovered that ladybugs love to eat aphid eggs, which reduced reliance on broad-spectrum chemicals like Lorsban. “We were doing a lot of things right, but we weren’t documenting it,” he says.

The SERF program got him to document these proactive environmental practices, and pushed Schaefer and his crew of 70 full-time workers to take their practices to the next level.

To fulfill the IPM category, for example, Schaefer trained his crew to identify every plant on the farm—beneficial plants as well as weeds—in addition to insects, birds, and other animals. As a result, his employees have become indispensable to catching problems early, spotting pests that attack the trees’ roots, and patches of Canadian Thistle, which, like other weeds, compete with young trees for soil nutrients and moisture.

“Thirty years ago, you’d spray the whole field with Roundup,” says Schaefer. Today, workers use specific herbicides for specific weeds: Stinger for Canadian Thistle; Asulox for Bracken Fern. (The farm does still use Roundup for general weed control, but they use it far less.) Instead of spraying pesticides via helicopter, crew members now go out and target the few trees that are infested. This approach not only saves the farm money—renting a helicopter is not cheap—it’s better for the workers’ health.

The SERF standards are part of what motivated Schaefer to buy a small drone to map the entire farm with photos and videos. (The standards require baseline mapping, though most farmers do it via Google.) While it may seem extreme to buy a drone to monitor Christmas tree health, Schaefer says the device has already paid off. “The quality of the pictures is so good … you can actually see sick trees” says Schaefer.

Noble Mountain alone harvests 600,000 trees each winter—most of which are sold at Home Depot and Walmart in the Northwest, California, Arizona, and Texas. And even though Schaefer hasn’t noticed increased sales since he got his SERF certification, using fewer pesticides has meant thank-you letters from satisfied customers. Many include a snapshot of themselves standing aside their bedecked tree. “Thank you for our beautiful Christmas tree. It is full and lush and still moist after three weeks!” wrote a happy customer last Christmas. “Thank you for being a great steward of the forest.”

25 October 2014

I've been pleased to see the re-emergence of local grain economies across the United States, including here in Oregon. Farmers are growing grains—like Red Fife, spelt, and kamut—that haven't been grown here for a long, long time, and they can't seem to produce enough for local bakers, who are creating magnificent loaves that sell out quickly. As I was doing some digging for another story, I stumbled upon this: farmer Tom Hunton at Camas Country Mill is growing teff—and lots of it. It turns out the Ethiopian diaspora in this country has more than doubled over the past 12 years, and they're snapping up all the U.S.-grown teff they can buy.

In the November issue of Portland Monthly, I write about Ethiopian-American business owner Tamrat Alemu, who sells Camas Country Mill teff at his market in North Portland. He also uses it to make fresh injera, the spongey flatbread that Ethiopians use in place of silverware to scoop up delicacies such as doro wot (chicken stew) and shiro wet (a spicy hommous). Here's a PDF of my article: Download PoMo teff

On December 18, 2012, a massive windstorm blew through the Willamette Valley, causing severe roof damage to Kevin and Carla Chambers’ triple-wide mobile home just outside Newberg. “We had a waterfall in our house,” says Kevin, a vineyard manager who has worked in the Oregon wine industry for 35 years. “My wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Obviously, we’ll have to do something about our living situation.’”

Back in 1989, the couple had bought a 32-acre property called Resonance, knowing that it was an exceptional site for growing pinot noir grapes. In the hands of local winemakers such as Peter Rosback at Sineann and Brian Marcy at Big Table Farm, Resonance fruit consistently made some of the best wines coming out of the valley, according to reviews in respected publications such as International Wine Cellar.

So it was with mixed emotions that Kevin and wife Carla decided to part with their property, selling it to the illustrious Burgundian winery Maison Louis Jadot. (The sale price was not disclosed, but insiders say it broke a record for per-acre price for a vineyard in Oregon.) Setting the international wine world atwitter, legendary Jadot winemaker Jacques Lardière came out of retirement to run the company’s Oregon outpost.

“It was hard to let go of Resonance,” Kevin says. But with the money they made from the sale, the Chambers were able to buy their first stick-built home—on a Christmas tree farm in the Eola-Amity Hills.

While modest in size—the property has 20 acres of planted vineyards—this Resonance sale is just one of a half dozen recent Willamette Valley real estate transactions that signals the region’s growing appeal on the international wine stage. This trend is being driven by a handful of factors: the drought in California, comparatively low land prices in the Willamette Valley and the aging of Oregon winemakers. But the central reason large, out-of-state players are investing in the Willamette Valley is consumer demand for Oregon pinot noir.

“There are not so many places outside Burgundy where pinot noir is known, and Oregon is one of them,” says Thibault Gagey, deputy general manager of Jadot, referring to the company’s decision to purchase its first vineyard outside of Burgundy in Yamhill-Carlton.

The Oregon wine industry has come a long way since 1965, when David and Diana Lett planted the first pinot noir cuttings in the Willamette Valley. The region achieved international acclaim in 1979 — when the Letts’ Eyrie pinot noir came in third place at a blind tasting of some of the world’s finest pinots in Paris. Burgundian wine producer Robert Drouhin was so impressed that he sent his daughter Véronique to Oregon to work the 1986 harvest with three Oregon winemakers. In 1987 Drouhin purchased 225 acres in the Dundee Hills, making Domaine Drouhin the first French firm to plant roots in the Willamette Valley.

Today there are around 600 wineries in Oregon. Three-fourths are still small by industry standards, producing fewer than 5,000 cases per year. A 2011 economic impact study valued the industry at $2.7 billion, but that figure is larger today, says Michelle Kaufmann at the Oregon Wine Board. “We’ve had record harvests since then, additional wineries popping up, and all this outside investment.”

By all accounts, the buying spree over the past two years is unprecedented. A year ago, Jackson Family Wines in Santa Rosa, California, bought 320 acres of vineyards in both the Eola-Amity Hills and the Yamhill-Carlton wine regions. In May 2013, Seattle’s Precept Wine, the largest privately owned wine company in the Northwest, bought the 30-acre Yamhela Vineyard. In April California-based Foley Family Wines acquired the Four Graces, which included 54 acres in the Dundee Hills and 40 acres in Yamhill-Carlton. Sommelier Larry Stone, former president of Evening Land Vineyards, just bought a vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills and has planted 66 acres.

Jadot winemaker Jacques Lardièrein the Resonance vineyard

In all cases, neither side would disclose sale prices. But Peter Bouman, the broker at Oregon Vineyard Property, says the recent range for planted acres has been between $45,000 and $60,000 an acre.

Private equity firms such as San Francisco-based Bacchus Capital Management have also made strategic investments in the valley. Bacchus has made debt and equity investments in Wine by Joe, one of the largest producers in Oregon, and in May they bought Panther Creek winery outright.

Then there are the outsiders who have been working and living here so long they are practically insiders. Domaine Drouhin staked its claim here 27 years ago. Late last year, they purchased the 122-acre Roserock Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills. This past March, pioneering Oregon winery Elk Cove bought the Goodrich Road Vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton, which has 21 acres of vineyard.

Wine-industry brokers say this is just the beginning. “The French are coming. And they’re going to keep coming,” says Bouman, who conducted the Jadot sale.

How is this frenzied activity impacting Oregon’s hundreds of small-scale winemakers? A tight-knit group — everybody here seems to know everybody else, and gossip travels fast — most winemakers interviewed for this article share the attitude of “a rising tide raises all ships.”

However, some also expressed anxiety about skyrocketing grape and real estate prices. Many winemakers don’t actually own their own vineyards, so these “land grabs” are taking thousands of acres of grapes off the market, causing a dearth of grapes and record-high prices. The average price for Oregon pinot noir grapes in 2012 was $2,738 per ton, a 20.6% increase over 2011. And though that figure dipped slightly in 2013, the price of North Willamette Valley pinot noir grapes — the most highly prized — were $2,819 a ton. As a result, winemakers who don’t own their own vineyards are being priced out of top-quality grapes.

Oregonians have long been sensitive to encroachment from outsiders. Today’s influx of well-heeled vintners from California, France and elsewhere echoes the recent migration of professionals from cities like Brooklyn and L.A. to Portland. Will the vintners, like these urban escapees seeking a greener, more balanced lifestyle, drive up real estate prices — not to mention bottle prices — in the Willamette Valley?

A perfect storm of factors has led to this moment. First, a bunch of vineyard owners are reaching mature vintages themselves — and are ready to cash in. “They’re 60, pushing 70, and need to retire,” notes Bouman, who has four vineyards for sale, including the 70-acre Eola Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills, listed at $2.5 million.

The historic drought in California is also much worse than winemakers anticipated. Every week headlines proclaim record-low rainfalls. As a result, vineyard managers are predicting extremely low yields.

Kevin and Carla Chambers soldResonance to Jadot in 2013

“There’s no question anymore that the water issues in California are driving people north,” says Bouman. “I got a call the other day from a guy who is growing 500 acres in Lodi [in California’s Sierra Foothills] and basically is considering selling everything lock, stock and barrel and moving up here because of the drought. I’m getting an increasing number of calls like that.”

Few California buyers will publicly admit that the drought is one of their reasons for coming to the Willamette Valley, where the average rainfall is 35 inches a year. Marcus Goodfellow, owner and winemaker at Matello Wines, thinks that’s intentional. “That’s the game changer that no one talks about,” says Goodfellow. “What happens when California can no longer be California?”

When people ask Hugh Reimers, chief operating officer of Jackson Family Wines, why the company bought land in Oregon, he jokes, “Well, we were worried about global warming.” But Reimers, who grew up in Australia, says that’s tongue in cheek. The wine behemoth — which owns vineyards in Chile, Australia, France and Italy — had been eyeing Oregon for a long time, he says. So when the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) decided to sell off its vineyard investments, putting more than 500 vineyard acres in Oregon on the market in 2013, Jackson Family Wines snapped two of them up.

In addition to buying Gran Moraine in Yamhill-Carlton and Zena Crown in west Salem, the company bought Soléna Estate, a 35-acre vineyard, and Maple Grove, a big tract of land near Monmouth, where the company is planting 100 acres of vineyard.

“There are few places in the world where you can grow world-class pinot noir,” Reimers says, explaining why the company purchased 1,380 land acres in Oregon. But it didn’t hurt that real estate here is far cheaper than in other fashionable wine-growing regions. “And I think Willamette Valley vineyard prices will continue to appreciate. “says Reimers. “So it was a good real estate investment for us, as well as investment in quality.” While prime vineyards in Napa can go for as high as $300,000 an acre, $50,000 an acre is more typical in the Willamette Valley.

According to Gagey, Jadot’s purchase of Resonance Vineyard had more to do with the valley’s high-quality pinot noir than low land prices. “We went there two times, we tried the wines, we liked the wines,” says Gagey of his visits to Resonance. They also loved the specific property, on an east-west ridge in Yamill-Carlton, because it was dryfarmed (not irrigated) and own-rooted. (That is, old vines, not grafted rootstock.) “Those two things, we are very interested in,” says Gagey. Though small in terms of acreage, this purchase represents a big shift for the 160-year-old winery, which until now has only had acreage in Burgundy. They expect to release 2,000 to 2,500 cases of their first Oregon vintage (from 2013) in 2016.

Many local winemakers are flattered by this newfound passion for Willamette Valley pinot — and think investments by well-financed outsiders are a good thing.

“I’ve gotta be honest: The vast majority of the last 40 years has been getting our pinot on the map,” says Goodfellow, who has been making wine in Oregon since 2002. “Seeing big players like Jackson Family Wines purchase here validates the Willamette Valley as a region.”

Goodfellow, who purchases all the fruit he uses to produce 4,000 cases of wine a year, was dismayed to learn that one of his regular fruit sources — Bishop Creek Cellars — was on the market. “I’ve been producing wine from that vineyard since 2005,” he says wistfully.

But the general sentiment amongst Oregon winemakers, he says, is that these recent acquisitions may turn out to be a great boon for the region. “What’s happening now is proof that we have a grown-up wine region. We’re not the little brother to Burgundy anymore.”

Thirty-five-year-old urban winemaker Thomas Monroe at Division Winemaking Company in Southeast Portland relies on other growers for all of his fruit too. Despite being pushed out of three vineyards — and being turned down by another — Monroe, too, is sanguine about the influx of out-of-state winemakers. “It causes some short-term supply chain issues,” he says. “But ultimately, it’s an accolade — these people believe in Oregon. They have a lot of money behind them. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t know that they would be able to make a high-quality product from this state.”

Oregon winemaker Eugenia Keegan

One thing that’s engendered good will is that most of these newcomers have hired well-regarded Oregon winemakers. “Jackson Family Wines has employed Eugenia Keegan, who is extraordinarily well-loved in Oregon,” says Goodfellow. (Keegan, who is general manager at JFW, came from Four Graces in Dundee.) JFW also hired Tony Rynders; Precept hired Sarah Cabot. Some companies have even continued allowing local winemakers to buy grapes from their new properties — at least for the time being. Lynn Penner-Ash, for one, was able to negotiate a long-term deal with JFW that allows her to keep buying grapes from one particular 3.5-acre block of the Zena Crown Vineyard. “We have worked with this site since its first crop in 2007 and have consistently done well in the press with the wines we produce from there,” says Penner-Ash. “It would be difficult to see our block go.”

But underneath this upbeat acceptance of outsiders lies a barely articulated wariness. The Willamette Valley has always positioned itself as the anti-Napa. Even today, tasting fees — if they exist — are minimal. And though there are plenty of fancy LEED-certified tasting rooms, there are just as many unheated sheds or scrappy living rooms where wine lovers taste by appointment only. Most established winemakers also have a philosophical commitment to keeping bottle prices affordable.

This presents a conundrum. One of the repercussions of these recent land grabs is that grape prices are through the roof. “In my 35 years in this industry, I have never seen grape prices higher than they are now,” says Kevin Chambers. And grapes from acclaimed sites like Shea Vineyards go for as much as $4,500 a ton.

Though of course a boon for vineyard owners, these higher grape prices mean wineries that don’t own their own vineyards are having to scramble to find new grape sources, or pay a premium.

Monroe and his wife, Kate, have felt the pinch of these price increases. Though they haven’t been directly impacted by the recent vineyard sales (yet), they have been priced out of a few of their regular fruit sources. Just four years ago, when he made his first Oregon vintage, Monroe was paying in the mid-$2,000 range per ton for pinot noir grapes. This year he’s paying well over $3,000.

Despite rising grape prices, Ken Pahlow, winemaker at Walter Scott Wines in the Eola-Amity Hills, hews to a $45 per bottle threshold. “I always felt that if Russ Raney [former winemaker at Evesham Wood] — after 25 years in the business — if his most expensive wine was $44, how could I come in and charge more?” Pahlow says about Raney’s Cuvée J, which Pahlow considers to be one of the best wines in the valley.

“Nearly 40% of our production is Willamette Valley pinot noir or chardonnay that retails for $23,” he says. “Once you get over $40, $45, you’re not going to sell a lot of wine to the Portland market.”

The newcomers — Jackson Family Wines, Jadot and Precept — are undeterred. Jackson’s entry-level Oregon Pinot under the La Crema label, released in April, retails for $35, and the company’s Gran Moraine Yamhill-Carlton Pinot is $45. These higher price points are strategic. “We didn’t go up there to try to bring the market down,” says COO Reimers. “If anything, we went up there because we saw an opportunity to elevate the market and the industry by producing wines at much higher price points.”

Elevating the market is a lofty goal. Elevating land prices … not so much. Peter Rosback at Sineann Winery — who purchases 100% of his grapes — says he was hurt by Kevin Chambers’ sale of Resonance Vineyard. “Kevin — he’s a friend of mine — he needed the money, but that pinot noir was really special,” says Rosback. He’s also frustrated by “California carpetbaggers” who have snapped up prime vineyards in the Willamette Valley.

“It’s annoyed me and friends of mine mostly because we aren’t rich,” says Rosback. “Winemaking is not a highly profitable enterprise. Our margins are low, and we have competition from all over the world.”

The winemaking process at Trisaetum Winery,where Jadot makes its wine. From top tobottom: The fruit is sorted, then dumped intoa vat to ferment. During the fermentationprocess, juice is drained from the bottomof the vat and pumped back to the topin a process called "pumping over."

Yet overall, even Rosback thinks these investments by well-financed outsiders are a good thing. “It’s validation of what our pioneers figured out 40 years ago,” he says.

This is a good outlook to have, since the acquisitions by outside winemakers show no signs of slowing down. In September California music executive Jay Boberg, chairman of digital music provider INgrooves, and Jean-Nicolas Méo of Domaine Meo-Camuzet in Burgundy bought the 13-acre Bishop Creek Cellars vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton. Bouman says a few additional high-profile French winemakers are poking around, and he’s also shown properties to Californian, Italian and even Brazilian buyers. Mike McLain at McLain & Associates Vineyard Properties in Albany confirms the interest from California and abroad, saying his phone is ringing off the hook. “We’re getting a lot of calls from all over!” he says.

And yet the question remains: Can the Willamette Valley make room for these deep-pocketed newcomers while maintaining its unpretentious, laid-back vibe? Or does their arrival signal a shift in the landscape — like the entrance of a shiny new Starbucks that drives up rents and latte prices in its wake?Gone are the days when a winemaker of modest means could buy land in the Willamette Valley without significant outside investments.

“The water is much deeper than it was 12 years ago when I started,” says Goodfellow. “Your margin for error is less. You have to elevate your game.”But if you can’t afford a vineyard — or land on which to plant one — then you’re stuck paying $3,500 a ton for pinot noir grapes … at least for a few years. People are planting like crazy right now, according to Goodfellow and others, so prices should come down in three years, when those vineyards start bearing fruit.

Which brings us back to per-bottle prices. The fastest-growing segment of the wine industry is the upper end of the wine market — those that sell for $20 a bottle or more. Plenty of Oregon winemakers already charge $50 or more per bottle. But with grape prices higher than ever — and Jackson Family Wines and other newcomers charging more per bottle — the idealistic Oregon winemakers who want to keep pinots affordable may have to rethink their strategy.

Maybe, just maybe, all these changes in the valley — not to mention the continued drought in California propelling winemakers to move north — will give Oregon winemakers permission to charge a little more for their wine. That would be a boon for Oregon winemakers, if not exactly for consumers.

As for Kevin Chambers: He had planned to farm hazelnuts on his new property in west Salem but can’t shake the grape-growing bug. “This property is crying out to be a vineyard,” he says of his new southeast-facing property, which spans the crown of the Eola-Amity Hills. Once Chambers rips out 62,000 more Christmas trees, he’ll plant grafted rootstock. He intends to sell his grapes to local winemakers. “It’s all cyclical. Prices are very high right now. We’ll see quite a bit of planting over the next five years, and then prices will come down again.”

21 August 2014

Whenever we go to the farmers’ market together, my husband and I disagree about whether we should buy the pricey certified organic berries (my husband’s vote) or the less expensive ones grown without certification, but described by the farm as “sustainably produced.” If I look deep into a farmer’s eyes and she tells me that her fruit is “no-spray,” I’ll buy her berries, saving almost a buck a pint. (After all, the strawberries we grow in our own backyard are not certified organic, but I feel good about eating them.)

Lately I’ve been wondering–is my husband right, or is no-spray enough? And what about the assertion—sometimes made by conventional growers—that certified organic farms use pesticides too?

Toxicity: It’s All Relative

In most cases, even certified organic produce is not pesticide-free. But compared to most conventional produce, it can mean a big step in a less-toxic direction.

“The overarching concept is that natural pesticides are allowed and synthetics are prohibited, unless specifically allowed,” says Nate Lewis, a senior crop and livestock specialist at the Organic Trade Association. Furthermore, before they can use any approved pesticides, organic farmers must prove that they have a preventative plan in place—and that the plan is failing to prevent pests.

So while most organic farmers rely on plant-based pesticides such as Pyrethrum (from chrysanthemum flowers), extracts of the Benin tree, neem oil, or an extract of the Japanese knotweed root (an effective fungicide), they can occasionally use synthetic pesticides—with strict limitations.

There are roughly 40 synthetic substances farmers can use under U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic standards, says Lewis. Some of these are as innocuous as newspaper, which is allowed for use as mulch or as a “feedstock” for compost, or sticky traps, which provide a physical function (trapping insects) and then are removed from the field at the end of the year.

Others include zinc, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, and cobalt—essential plant micronutrients that cannot be used as insecticides or fungicides in most cases. Instead, they’re usually used as soil amendments. (A full list of the chemicals that are allowed under USDA organic standards is available at the Organic Materials Review Institute.)

About 26 of the 40 synthetic substances allowed in organic crop production are considered pesticides. But these have restrictions, too. For example, soap-based herbicides can only be used on right-of-ways and ditches, but can’t come into contact with organic food. Boric acid, which is a synthetic insecticide, can be used for pest control, but can’t come into contact with crops or soil. Similarly, ammonium carbonate can only be used as bait in insect traps.

This list is constantly under scrutiny and is therefore always being revised. For example, until recently, USDA organic standards made an exemption for the use of antibiotics—specifically tetracycline and streptomycin—to be sprayed on organic apple and pear orchards to prevent fire blight, which is highly contagious and can wipe out a whole orchard.

“It was only allowed at bloom time, which is the only time the orchard is susceptible, so there’s no residue on fruit,” explains Lewis. Nonetheless, the National Organics Standards Board (NOSB) let the exemptions for these antibiotics expire—starting October 2014.

But just because a chemical comes from a plant doesn’t make it safe. Rotenone, a toxic pesticide that’s derived from the roots of several tropical and sub-tropical plants such as the jicama, can no longer be used on crops in the U.S.—even conventionally farmed ones.

Last year, the NOSB recommended that it be put on the prohibited list by January 2016. But according to Miles McEvoy, Deputy Administrator of the National Organics Program at the USDA, the agency has more work to do before it can follow the NOSB’s recommendation. Until that happens, Rotenone can still be used on organic banana crops grown in tropical countries like Ecuador.

Despite these allowances, the pesticides and herbicides used on conventional farms are still significantly worse. Take organophosphates, for instance. This class of pesticide is used on conventional peaches, apples, grapes, green beans, and pears. According to Pesticide Action Network’s database, organophosphates are some of the most toxic insecticides used today. They have been shown to “adversely affect the human nervous system even at low levels of exposure” and hamper neurological development in children. The commonly used herbicides Glyphosate (Roundup) and Atrazine, have also both been shown to act as endocrine disruptors, meaning they interfere with the endocrine (or hormone system) in people and many animals.

Is Talking to Your Farmer Enough?

Oregon farmer Don Kruger, the owner of a 150-acre farm on Sauvie Island and two Portland farm stands, abhors labels. “I honestly would rather talk to the customers, if I could, or have them talk to my staff,” he says.

In the 14 years he’s owned his farm, he’s never sprayed a pesticide directly on any food crop. Yet, he says, “I have no interest in being straight-up organic. It gives me a little wiggle room to do things I might need to do.

Kruger uses a conventional fungicide on his raspberries. “The Tulameen is the best tasting raspberry—it’s fabulous. But the problem is, it’s prone to root rot,” he says. “I could grow another, inferior grade raspberry, but I don’t want to.” He sprays the plant just as it’s starting to leaf—before it blossoms or fruits.

He also uses an herbicide called Impact (a broad spectrum herbicide with topramezone as the active ingredient) on his corn. It kills the weeds—grass, pig weed, thistle, etc.—that would otherwise hinder the corn’s growth. “Otherwise you have to hand hoe it, and it’s really tough to do,” Kruger says. He sprays when the plant is two inches high and that’s it. “There’s no chance it’s on the corn,” he says.

Kruger believes he is offering a more affordable option, a middle-ground for folks who want local food that’s not conventional, but don’t mind that it’s not certified organic either. He is known in Portland for having the most affordable produce around and he prides himself on that.

But not everyone has the time for a 10 minute long conversation with their farmer about his growing practices and the nuances of what and when they spray. Furthermore, there are a lot of unregulated terms—like “no-spray” and “sustainably grown”—that get tossed around. And not everyone is as forthright about their practices as Kruger.

David Lively, vice president of sales and marketing at Organically Grown Company, the largest organic produce wholesaler in the Northwest, says farmers markets aren’t always as transparent as many customers believe. “There have been instances where growers selling produce at farmers’ markets have been busted for selling conventional as organic and product they bought off the market as their own.” Lively thinks—and many others in the organic movement agree—that organic certification offers the consumer extra assurance.

Other Reasons to Go Organic

At the end of the day, organic agriculture is about much more than reducing pesticide use. To grow food organically, farmers must build their soil, using techniques like composting, cover crops, and crop rotations rather than fossil fuel-intensive synthetic fertilizer. Doing so is a lot more work. But on an environmental level, that matters.

It’s true that organic certification requires a time commitment on the part of the grower. In addition to a 12-page application, as well as regular audits, organic farmers must document a great deal of what they do. The cost to farmers is also a factor, but it doesn’t have to be prohibitive. The USDA has a cost-share program that reimburses farmers 75 percent of the cost of certification, up to $750 per type of farming. Connie Carr, the certification director at Oregon Tilth, which inspects and certifies food producers for the USDA, says farmers take advantage of it.

“So if your certification costs $1,000”—the upper end of what a small farmer would pay per year—“you’ll get $750 back,” says Carr. Fortunately for farmers, this funding was renewed in the 2014 farm bill.

To help streamline the paperwork, which Carr says is no more arduous than applying for a loan or for college, the National Organic Program at the USDA introduced a “Sound & Sensible” initiative in 2013, which works with farmers to remove barriers to certification. Now, re-applying for certification each year is much easier (a farmer only has to submit changes) and some certifiers have launched online applications.

Will these changes lead to more certified organic farmers? It’s too soon to say. But one thing is clear: Consumer demand for organic food continues to grow. Organic food in the U.S. has been growing by an average of 13 percent per year over the past decade and reached $35 billion last year. Most farmers who take the plunge and go organic will have no problem selling their crops—and they’ll be able to charge a premium for them, too. And why shouldn’t they? Hoeing weeds by hand, cover-cropping, and keeping meticulous records is hard work. Maybe next time I’ll spring for those certified organic berries.

16 July 2014

Demand for organic food continues to soar: Last year, sales of organic food rose to $32.3 billion — up 10% from 2012. Here in Oregon, organic produce wholesaler Organically Grown Co. has been championing organic growing methods for four decades. Founded as a cooperative in Eugene 36 years ago, OGC started with less than a dozen organic farms. “And some of those were big gardens!” recalls David Lively, one of the founders.

Though it became a for-profit company in 1983, OGC (like another local organic success story, Bob’s Red Mill) is also an ESOP, meaning its employees and member farmers are owner/shareholders. Today, the company has annual sales of over $125 million and employs around 250 people who work at the company’s Eugene, Portland, or Kent, Washington offices — or at its 120,000-square-foot distribution center in Gresham.

I sat down with Lively, who is now the company’s Vice President of sales and marketing, to ask him about the company’s growth, why it distributes New Zealand apples and South American bananas and the reason the Northwest is such an organic stronghold.

OB: You’re an organic produce wholesaler—the company transports organic produce from farms to grocery stores, juice bars, and food buying clubs. But while you’re Northwest-based, you don’t only distribute regional produce. Can you explain?

DL: Even back in the ‘80s, we knew we had to source some produce from outside the Northwest. Some of the growers just wanted to move their stuff, but another group of us were like, “That leaves us with a serious predicament because we’re in Oregon and so we can only grow crops half the year. We’ll have nothing to do from November through April. What’s going to pay the rent?"

So we’re working with growers that are located all the way from British Columbia through the western United States to Mexico, South America, Hawaii, and even New Zealand. We have a full product line, pulling from all over the joint.

OB: You’re an S-Corp and an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). What’s the difference between a farmer-owner and a farmer who merely has their produce distributed by you?

DL: Owners’ shares are worth value and so their shares increase as the company grows. We’ve got growers who, when they joined and put down $15,000 in the ‘80s, are worth tens of millions of dollars now. Owners vote for the board of directors and they may serve on the board of directors. At some point, they can retire and the business will buy their shares.

OB: How many growers do you work with, total?

DL: It’s hard to say because some of those growers are disguised behind brokers. We work with an outfit called Awe Sum Organics, which works with apple growers in New Zealand. We only bill Awe Sum, but they represent a lot of growers. Same with our banana deal: we only work with Organics Unlimited, but Mayra [Velazquez de Leon] represents growers who work in Southern Mexico. But I’d say about 240.

11 July 2014

In many ways, Shari Sirkin and Bryan Dickerson, the farmers at Dancing Roots Farm in Troutdale, Oregon, have made it. They run a popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, their heirloom vegetables grace the menus at some of Portland’s finest restaurants—including Ned Ludd, Irving Street Kitchen, and Luce—and last year they won the prestigious Local Hero award from the environmental nonprofit Ecotrust. But despite all this, the farmers barely make ends meet. They drive a 1995 Toyota wagon, never go on vacation, and had to take out a loan to buy a used tractor. “We rarely eat out. Even though we want to support the restaurants that love us,” says Sirkin.

The odds are so stacked against small-scale farmers, it’s a wonder any of them can make a living at all. In fact, statistics show that most don’t: According to the latest agriculture census, 57 percent of America’s 2.1 million farms gross less than $10,000 a year, forcing them to rely on “off-farm” income.

But a new real estate trend might just help farmers pay the bills and allow them to go out for an occasional meal to boot.

Development Supported Agriculture (DSA) or “agrihoods,” are suburban housing developments built around working farms. Unlike traditional suburbs, DSAs make a commitment to preserving some rural land for agriculture—be it six or 100 acres. Though there’s no firm count on how many agrihoods exist in the U.S., a recent story in The New York Times listed a dozen. The most well-known DSAs range from the 16-acre Agritopia, outside Phoenix, Arizona, whose farm supplies a farm-to-table restaurant, to Serenbe, which has a 7-acre organic farm and CSA just south of Atlanta, Georgia. (Serenbe also has three restaurants that make use of the farm’s produce.) And Daron “Farmer D” Joffe, a consultant to many agrihoods, estimates that there are actually more like two dozen, with that number expected to rise exponentially over the next decade.

The benefit to residents is obvious: farm-fresh produce, pastoral views, and the chance to support a super-local food economy. But what’s in it for farmers?

First, they earn a salary–anywhere from $30,000-$100,000, depending on experience. The job also often comes with on-farm housing. Ashley Rodgers, 28, the current farm manager at Serenbe, gets free housing—as do her (paid) interns. This is a huge perk, because, as she points out, farmers do best when they can live on or very near to the farm. “Right now I’m running irrigation,” said Rodgers on the phone recently. “I’m going to have to come back in four hours so I can turn it off before I go to sleep.”

Unlike many sole proprietors, Rodgers doesn’t need to put aside a chunk of her income for the mortgage. Rodgers, who started the organic vegetable farm on a ranch called White Oaks Pastures, also gets profit-sharing at Serenbe. Roughly 50 of Serenbe’s 200 households subscribe to Rodger’s weekly CSA. She also sells fresh produce—lettuce, kholrabi, squash, cabbages, eggplants, tomatoes, you name it—at Serenbe’s Saturday farmers’ market, where residents set up an account and can shop without using cash.

“It’s very old-school,” says Rodgers. “There’s a small-town feel to it.” Though she thinks the farm will be lucky to break even this year, she hopes it will make a profit next year, which gives her incentive to stick around.

For Eric Calberg, farm manager of the educational programs at Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Illinois, shared infrastructure is a big upside to working in an agrihood. Prairie Crossing devotes 100 acres to agriculture, but leases most of that land to Sandhill Family Farms and a coterie of beginning farmers via an incubator program. Five acres are designated for farming education and workforce development. It is here that Calberg runs a job training program for area high school students called Prairie Farm Corps.

“We all use the same tractor,” says Calberg. “And well, we’re sharing a lot of knowledge, too, helping each other out.”

The lack of affordable farmland is what steered 36-year-old Michael Snow towards a job as farm manager at Willowsford a 4,000-acre agrihood in Ashburn, Virginia. “Like a lot of young farmers, I was in a position where capital and land were the tough spots,” he says.

For now, Snow and his crew farm eight acres, but eventually—when they finish cover-cropping—they’ll have 25-30 tilled acres of veggies. The developers hope the farm will eventually be self-sustaining, but in the meantime they are paying several full-time farmers.

Jobs like these are rare, but they’re worth it, says Daron Joffe, who used to run a CSA on his own farm in Wisconsin. “An insane amount of work goes into farming and at the end of the day, there is just not that much money to it,” he adds. Joffe, who is now the ranch development director at the Leichtag Foundation in Encinitas, California, sold his farm and became the first farm manager at Serenbe. As he sees it, one of the biggest rewards of working at a DSA—at least for sociable farmers—is community-building.

“When you’re under the pressure of trying to make a living, you don’t have time to shoot the breeze with the neighbors. It’s like ‘You wanna talk? Pull some weeds and follow me.’ In a DSA environment, it’s not about pure survival and production, it’s about community. Taking that pressure off and adding community-building is very attractive,” he says.

Of course, even for farmers with paying jobs in agrihoods, the grass often looks greener on their own farm–even if it doesn’t exist yet. Ashley Rodgers finds her work at Serenbe all-consuming and gratifying for now, but adds: “Eventually it gets old. You just want that something to call your own.”

16 June 2014

This Field Note appears in the Design section of Modern Farmer (pg. 64):

Anna Cohen's lipstick red Charlie Dress, made of Oregon wool

Since 1999, rancher Jeanne Carver's Imperial Stock Ranch in central Oregon has spun spools of beautiful raw wool yarn. Dyed, carded, and spun on site, “Imperial Yarn” has fetched rave reviews from knitters, who love its natural softness and sheen as well as its spongy, lightweight texture. It was also the favorite domestic wool of designers at Ralph Lauren, who sought it out for the patchwork cardigans that Team U.S.A. wore at the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics.

Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carver has now teamed up with green fashion designer Anna Cohen to do a line of “ranch-to-runway” apparel. The collection, which debuts this fall, will have more than a dozen elegant pieces for women. Our favorite is the Stella Dress ($680), a sexy, geometric frock inspired by the work of midcentury modern great Frank Stella and the lipstick red Charlie Dress ($350), which wouldn’t seem out of place on Jackie O. (Suggested retail prices: check website for stores.)

05 June 2014

Amy Kleinman had never had a job with lasting appeal. Most recently, Kleinman, 28 and living with Asperger syndrome, taught at a day care center. “I was having a lot of trouble there,” says Kleinman. “Not with the kids—I loved the babies. I was having problems with the adults.”

Then, three years ago, Kleinman got a job at Cleveland Crops, an urban farm and nonprofit dedicated to community development and food security.

"This is the first job I’ve had that keeps me getting up and wanting to go to work,” says Kleinman, who does everything from harvesting and washing vegetables to making deliveries to local restaurants. This season, she has been learning the basics of permaculture and worm composting.

She also helps New Product Development Supervisor, Nonni Casino, grow flowers and create swags and wreaths. “Someday Amy could work in a wonderful flower shop,” says Casino.

Cleveland Crops is just one of many farming projects in a city that has established itself as a mecca of urban farming. Not only does the rust belt city boast one of the largest contiguous urban farms in the country, but it has 20 farmers’ markets—all of which accept food stamps—and dozens of popular farm-to-table restaurants, many of which source ingredients from farms that are just blocks away. But what makes Cleveland Crops unique is that each of the 65 farmers who work there has a developmental disability of some sort—from autism and epilepsy to Down syndrome.

Founded four years ago by the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities and SAW, Inc., Cleveland Crops started with one acre in 2010 and will be farming a whopping 40 acres at a dozen locations around Cleveland by the end of this year. The farms—which include a 15,000 square-foot greenhouse and half a dozen hoop houses—provide pesticide-freeproduce for local restaurants, farmers’ markets, and a 300-member CSA. (They also sell produce to a popular grocery store in the area called Nature’s Bin.)

Traditionally, Clevelanders with developmental disabilities would have been trained for jobs in the manufacturing sector, but those jobs have been waning for decades, while urban farming is on the upswing. And in Cleveland, as in other parts of the country, demand for local, pesticide-free food is on the rise.

Cleveland chef/restaurateur Zach Bruell has worked with Cleveland Crops since it started four years ago and now uses the organization’s produce in six of his seven restaurants. “They’re real farmers, real agronomists,” says Bruell. He’s asked the crew to custom plant specialty vegetables like mâche, mico-greens, and pasilla bajio peppers.

Cleveland Crops is meant to be a temporary training venue. The goal, according to executive director Rich Hoban, is to train adults with developmental disabilities for jobs either in the urban farming sector, the food service industry, or—perhaps in Kleinman’s case—at a high-end flower shop.

“Our long-term objective is to get people permanent employment with other businesses,” says Hoban. For now—maybe because Cleveland Crops is the largest farming operation in the county and needs more staff than other area farming businesses—most trainees have stuck around. And that’s working out okay for most of them. Whereas some organizations that hire people with developmental disabilities get a federal waiver to pay below the minimum wage, Kleinman, like the other 64 trainees at Cleveland Crops, earn minimum wage ($7.95 an hour in Ohio).

Of course, the employees are also gaining transferable skills. Case in point: The organization has just opened a 5,000 square-foot Food Innovation Center—a commercial kitchen complete with three double convection ovens, a double walk-in fridge, and 11 commercial dehydrators. Trainees are already learning how to dehydrate fruits and kale (for kale chips) to be sold at farmers’ markets and CSA shares this summer. Soon they’ll learn how to make soups, barbecue sauce, salsa, and tomato sauce. They’re also co-packing for local food businesses like Twenty-4 Zen, a granola company.

For the workers, many of whom live in food deserts, there’s another benefit to working at Cleveland Crops: access to fresh, free food.

“I never used to eat tomatoes,” says Kleinman. Now, she says she regularly takes home veggies she didn’t eat fresh before she had this job. “It’s quality control,” she says joking. “I ate an asparagus stalk right out in the field the other day.”

Casino, who is a chef and food justice activist, offers employees misshapen produce and dehydrated foods like kale chips, which are tossed in an addictive topping of nutritional yeast, sea salt, lemon juice, and cashew bits. “This is not just about growing food,” she says. “This is about educating the people who really need this quality food.”

Now that the kitchen is open, Casino will start making soups and other healthy prepared foods, which she intends to tempt trainees with.

One of the organization’s biggest fans is city councilman Joe Cimperman. “They are at the forefront of the urban agriculture movement in Cleveland. But it’s not just that they’re taking over abandoned lots,” says Cimperman. “They’ve been an instigator of economic and community development.” Just one example: Before Cleveland Crops converted an abandoned school into the organization’s first farm, there were eight condemned or foreclosed homes surrounding the property. Three years later, those homes have all been purchased or rehabbed.

“Bricks were falling on the sidewalk and hitting people. It was absolute disinvestment,” recalls Cimperman of the school. “People used to drop off burned-up cars in the parking lot.” Today, that lot is covered with hoop houses filled with vegetable starts. “It’s beautiful,” says Cimperman. “They’re producing beautiful stuff!”

When Daron Joffe dropped out of college to become an organic farmer, his parents cheered him on. “Okay, Farmer D, let’s see where this goes,” his mom said. He apprenticed on several organic farms in the Midwest, picked up biodynamic farming from Hugh Lovel at the Union Agriculture Institute, and eventually bought a 175-acre farm in Wisconsin where he launched a successful community supported agriculture (CSA) program. After several stints in the nonprofit world, Joffe was asked to help design and run an organic farm at one of the first “agrihoods” in the country, Serenbe. A planned community built around an organic farm, Serenbe was the beginning of Joffe’s career as an “entre-manure.

Essentially anyone who is committed in some way to improving our food system and the health of our planet through action. You can be a citizen farmer from a classroom, a kitchen, a board room, or the mayor’s office. You left your own farm in Wisconsin because you wanted to raise awareness about biodynamic agriculture among the masses.

How did you go from being a farmer to a farmer-activist?

I loved the CSA model—the farm as a platform for education and community building. But I felt that I wasn’t going to be able to make a big enough impact on my farm. And so, my first inclination was “I need to be more urban.” So I bought a food truck in Madison—it was a farm-to-table food truck (the falafel had heirloom tomatoes and fresh arugula from my farm)—and started doing more urban gardening. That kind of reinforced for me: [Cities] are where change needs to happen. I thought, “I’m going to sell the farm, and come back to farming later in life. But I need to devote this energetic time of life in communities that need it.”

After working at a few nonprofits, you found yourself becoming what you call an “entre-manure.” How did that transformation come about?

I had had this idea for years, of bringing the farm into the Jewish summer camp environment. It would be a way to get better food into the cafeteria, get kids connected to the environment and farming. I presented this idea to a Jewish Community Center, near where I was going to school in Georgia, and I managed to raise the money and build this garden that’s still there. It was a huge success.

One day, this development person from the JCC asked me to apply for a social entrepreneurship grant called the Joshua Venture Fellowship. It’s a two-year fellowship and they pick eight people from around the country. I got it. They gave me a mentor who was this guru of nonprofits. I sat down and had coffee with him. I said, “Here’s what I do: I design and build these gardens, train somebody to run them, and then I check in on them and then I’m done.”

And he said, “That sounds like a business. Why are you doing it as a nonprofit?”

I didn’t even realize it, but for those few years, I had been building my consulting expertise. When I got the opportunity to work at Serenbe, just southwest of Atlanta, I’d been doing it already.

Was Serenbe the first of these so-called “agrihoods”—planned communities built around a farm?

It was one of the first. There was Prairie Crossing, and a few really small things had happened—co-housing communities with small farms. But Serenbe was the first that had clustered, hamlet-style villages around a farm. It was also the first on this scale.

Though you’ve worked as a consultant on private developments around the country, you’ve kept doing pro bono work, building farms and gardens for homeless shelters, youth prisons, and boys & girls clubs. Is that part of your company’s mission?

My bread and butter clients are big developments and high-end resorts and I take on as much of the discounted nonprofit stuff that I can afford. I’m in a position now, in my new role [as ranch development director] at the Leichtag Foundation, where that’s more my core.

You say in your book that “most biodynamic farming lessons are no more mystical than The Farmers’ Almanac.” Is there a misconception about biodynamic farming?

The other day, I got an e-mail from an agroecology professor I worked for at the University of Georgia-Athens, to whom I’d sent a copy of the book. He wrote a wonderful review of the book and at the end of it he said, “I only have one criticism: The biodynamic subtitle. Organic agriculture has been scientifically proven and accepted by scientists. But biodynamic remains in the realm of superstition. It may be proven someday, but why not just call it the ‘organic way to grow healthy food?’”

And I can appreciate that. But last night I had a drink with a good friend of mine, who said, “I love that you have biodynamic on the cover of this book!”

So it’s important to shine a light on this; it has been a big part of my experience with agriculture. It brings a spiritual approach that I relate to; organics doesn’t necessarily have that component. From the science perspective, sure, organic agriculture is more developed and scientifically proven. But I’ve seen biodynamics in practice and I’ve seen it work. The book is not all about biodynamics, but my goal was to demystify it a bit, and show that it can be effective.

The latest Agriculture Census data shows that over half of America’s farmers don’t call farming their primary occupation—presumably because they can’t make enough money. What financial advice would you give young farmers?

Most farmers already know this: It’s a labor-of-love career. The quality of life is the richness that you get. My advice is to [prioritize] good planning, good management, delegate, and engage your customers so that they can participate as much as possible. Building a good team is key. And having somebody in the family that has a stable job is always a good thing! Farming is fickle, and you never know. So, have another creative revenue stream that’s not as dependent on the crop harvest–whether that’s something you do collectively as a family or via events, cooking, consulting, or whatever.

Find opportunities that can relieve some of the financial burden or provide you with stability. If you can work within an existing infrastructure—whether that’s an incubator or an existing agricultural or land trust operation where you could share equipment.

The last thing I would say is do a CSA. It provides you with low-risk seed capital.

Are there other entre-manurial ways of making a living as a farmer?

There are more and more farm management and educator roles out there. Universities are starting farms, and so are developers, nonprofits—even cities. And there are some ways to save money with government programs—subsidizing organic certification, or putting land into conservation easement to reduce taxes.

Where can farmers learn more about these programs?

ATTRA (National Sustainable Agricultural Information Service) is a government resources site for alternative farming. And SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program, lists grants. The USDA is also a good resource, too. There’s a whole beginning farmer section that helps identify resources; it’s amazing!

You went to 13 banks before you found one that would secure you a loan. Any tips?

Ha! Part of it was having a good business plan. I said: Here’s how a CSA works, and here’s my financial plan, and here’s my experience. And part of it was my dad guaranteeing the loan!

Today there are beginning farmer loans through the FSA (Farm Service Agency at the USDA), but there weren’t at the time. A lot of the banks just looked at my crop list and their eyes rolled back. “You’re not doing corn and soybeans?” They just did not understand it. There is a lot more support from social venture type funds now. Slow Money, for example. And lot of starter farms are being funded by angels–wealthy people who are passionate about this.

Aside from donating extra produce to the local food bank, what can citizen farmers do to get more healthy food into low-income neighborhoods?

Encourage vegetable gardening, especially in neighborhoods that lack access and resources. Some CSAs offer programs where you can sponsor a CSA share for a family in need. Advocate to local government, business, and community leaders about how important it is to get fresh food into low-income communities, schools, and shelters and support local sustainable agriculture.

Why did you decide to write a book?

I’ve always had a really hard time explaining what I do. So the book has been a good way to express my philosophy, my motivation, and my goals. My driving passion has always been to raise awareness and make change on a big scale; a book seemed like a great way to do that.

30 April 2014

When the historic Lostine Tavern closed in January 2013, residents of the Wallowa Valley in Eastern Oregon lost a central meeting place.

The tavern, located in a 1902 gothic building, had been a cornerstone of this rural farming community since the 1940s. It was the kind of place where locals would meet for a beer or come for a hearty breakfast before heading out to the ranch for a day’s work.

“They did taco nights and socials,” says local writer and chef Lynne Curry. ““It was beloved.” But it hadn’t been a viable business for awhile.

The gothic façade of the Lostine Tavern, in Eastern Oregon

Curry, former chair of Wallowa’s Slow Food chapter and the author of Pure Beef (a guide to cooking grass-fed beef), had wanted to open a farm-to-table restaurant ever since she moved to Wallowa in 2001. But there were obstacles. Wallowa County produces enormous amounts of beef and wheat, but most of it leaves the state, feeding the commodity food system instead of local residents.

“I went to a cattleman’s meeting the other night and met a rancher who said he could get enough beef to feed 40,000 people a year!” says Curry. According to the last Agriculture Census, only 2.16% of the livestock and crops produced in Wallowa County are direct sales. The rest — 97.84% — is sold outside the county, typically to the commodity market.

Curry and fellow Slow Food board member Peter Ferré had been hatching a plan to serve local food in Wallowa when the Lostine Tavern went on the market. Ferré snapped up the tavern (which narrowly escaped an explosive fire this February) and Curry became his business partner. (In January, Lisa Armstrong-Roepke joined on as a third business partner.)

Curry has an impressive pedigree: she’s cooked at both Seattle’s Herbfarm and at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island. But the revamped Lostine Tavern, which is slated to open mid-May, will not be upscale. Curry envisions an old-timey menu with pot pies, sourdough biscuits, pepper steak, and fruit cobbler. “I want to hearken back to the most deluxe mining camp you can imagine,” says Curry, who will run the kitchen. “The funny part is that making pickles, canning, sourdough—all the things that are so popular now—they’ve never gone out of style here. We’ll do all the things people have done for generations.” She also plans to revive taco nights and pie socials.

Until recently, Lostine (population 213) was a food desert, with the closest full-service grocery store — a Safeway in Enterprise — ten miles away. But that’s starting to change. Last summer, internationally-known furniture designer Tyler Hays (a Wallowa native) moved back and bought M. Crow Mercantile, keeping the 100-year-old general store stocked with fresh local produce, eggs, and meat. June Colony, who aggregates produce grown in the lower valley and sells it via June’s Local Market in Lostine, recently got a $68,000 grant from the USDA to invest in infrastructure like cold storage units and a refrigerated truck that will help her increase Wallowa residents' access to high-quality produce.

The revamped Lostine Tavern, though it won’t have a grocery section, will also expand residents’ access to local, quality food with a deli that will have sandwiches, meats and cheeses by the pound (including a housemade pastrami), and all kinds of prepared seasonal salads — from green to potato.

Keeping prices affordable for this farming community, where 28% of residents qualify for food stamps, is crucial to the Lostine Tavern’s success, says Curry. She and her business partners will achieve this by raising as much money up-front as possible via ChangeFunder, a new crowd-funding site that focuses exclusively on Northwest businesses that have a mission of growing healthy communities. ChangeFunder is a project of Springboard Innovation, a Portland-based nonprofit dedicated to helping people launch sustainable ventures. The Lostine Tavern was the first project to go live on the site.

“Lynne and Peter have the same kind of values that we do,” says Amy Pearl, founder and CEO of Springboard Innovation. “They want to build a value chain for local markets that doesn’t exist right now.” Wallowa farmers and ranchers like Beth Gibans at Backyard Gardens and Liza Jane McAlister and Adele Nash at 6 Ranch have already expressed interest in supplying Lostine Tavern, and Curry is talking to a local woman who is raising pastured chickens.

The economic impact of keeping money in the local foodshed could be huge. Research from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa shows that $1 spent on local food can have a "multiplier effect" of as much as $2.60. In other words, for every dollar a Wallowa County farmer makes, $2.60 is generated in the wider local economy (because he or she is paying employees and buying goods and services at local businesses like M. Crow Mercantile). “That same $1 spent at a national grocery chain leaves the county quickly because that chain—for the most part—doesn’t buy local goods and services and profits go wherever the corporate headquarters are located,” explains Portland-based food systems consultant Matthew Buck.

Another happy result of the Lostine Tavern sourcing locally-produced food? Not only will Wallowa-area farmers and ranchers be able to charge higher prices selling locally than they would by selling to the commodity market, they’ll be able to keep a larger share of that end price.

10 April 2014

It may be obvious, but most farmers don’t make a lot of money. According to preliminary data from the 2012 Agriculture Census, 52% of America’s 2.1 million principal farm-operators don’t call farming their primary occupation. Presumably, that’s because they need off-farm income and/or health care benefits to survive.

Curious to know a little bit more about how farmers make a living in Oregon—particularly on small and medium-sized farms—I called up a farmer I’d bumped into recently at the Farmer-Chef Connection conference, Josh Volk. Volk, who worked at Sauvie Island Organics for seven years before launching his own organic vegetable farm, Slow Hand Farm, is now farming at Our Table Cooperative in Sherwood.

Farmer Josh Volk at Our Table Cooperative

(photo by Shawn Linehan)

When he was at Sauvie Island Organics, Volk averaged 40 hours a week and received a monthly salary. But Volk wanted to spend less time farming and more time sharing his wisdom about farming. When he left to start Slow Hand Farm, he kept it small enough—.15 acres—so that he could get all his production, harvesting, planting, cultivating, and deliveries done in two days—and devote the remaining three to teaching, consulting, and writing.

As sole proprietor of Slow Hand Farm, Volk was able to turn a profit and pay himself a salary, though a meager one. “It varied from season to season. I think my worst year was something like $7.50 an hour. My best year was $10 an hour,” says Volk, who posted the figures on his blog. Fortunately, Volk—like over half of American farmers—had “off-farm” income coming in to supplement his farming income.

One of his consulting projects was helping former Microsoft program manager Narendra Varma and his wife Machelle develop Our Table Cooperative Farm, a multi-stakeholder cooperative in Sherwood. When Varma asked Volk to join his team of vegetable farmers, Volk initially hesitated because Our Table was so far from his St. John’s home. But many elements of the project appealed to Volk, so he ultimately agreed to fold Slow Hand Farm’s CSA into Our Table.

Now Volk—who works at Our Table three days a week— makes more than he did at his own farm, and he no longer has to market or distribute his vegetables—other staffers perform these jobs. (One of the benefits of Our Table’s model is a shared infrastructure including marketing, selling, and distribution—not to mention farm equipment, tools, and land. The farmer is freed up to do what he or she does best: farm.) That said, Volk, an avid biker, is committed to dropping off Our Table CSA shares via his cargo bike at Wieden+Kennedy, a yoga studio in Northeast, and his own front porch in St. John’s.

A veggie share from Our Table Cooperative Farm

During a year-long trial period, Volk and five other farmers have been working as regular employees, but now they’re faced with a decision: will they financially invest in the co-op and be partial owners? Or leave? If Volk decides to be a partial owner, he, along with other farmer-owners, will not only be eligible for profit-sharing, he’ll be able to make decisions about what to grow and what to do with the profit. For example, if farmer-owners choose to, they could vote to provide themselves with health insurance.

At first glance, the cooperative model seems to offer farmers a more stable income. Rather than being reliant on the weather, or how much you sell at the farmers’ market each week, you get an agreed-upon salary. (Though Volk works part-time, the other five farmers at Our Table are full time. An additional two part-time farmers were hired last week.) But as Volk points out, a worker-owned co-op isn’t all that different than any other business, it’s just that a group makes decisions instead of a CEO. “If you don’t make the budget, like in any budget, you either have to decide to shut something down or take out debt,” notes Volk.

But there are other benefits to working in a cooperative farm. Shari Sirkin at Dancing Roots Farms and her husband Bryan Dickerson are sole proprietors of a 10-acre farm in Troutdale that has a popular CSA and supplies some of Portland’s top restaurants including Ned Ludd, Genoa, and Navarre. But even after farming full-time since 1997 (with one year off to fix up the old farmhouse on the Troutdale property) Sirkin still doesn’t make enough money to take an annual vacation. (And only recently were she and Bryan able to leave the farm with a trusted employee so they could take a weekend getaway.)

Though she pays her workers good hourly wages (anywhere from $9.10-$11) she hasn’t been able to offer health insurance and is convinced that she and Bryan only make ends meet because they live a frugal farmer’s lifestyle. “I don’t really know how we do it,” Sirkin says, a note of wonderment in her voice. “We rarely eat out—though we love it and we want to support the restaurants that love us. I’m not into clothes or jewelry, we never take vacations, our cars are old and used, we don’t have cell phones. Hell, we don’t even have a T.V.!”

Volk acknowledges that one of the main benefits of the cooperative model is that it allows him—and other Our Table farmers—to take time off. Because the Varmas have capital, Volk has also been able to scale up quicker than he could’ve done on his own. The Varmas bought farming equipment and the land—which came with a blueberry farm—and are building a farm stand on site as well as a commercial kitchen, where a new prepared foods manager (yet to be hired) will create value-added products like stews, soups, pies, and jam. It’s too soon to know if the investments that Varma and others are making will pay off, but many are curious to see if this innovative model will bear fruit.

Meanwhile, risk-averse farmers with a social bent may want to work at an “agrihood,” a planned community built around a working farm. According to a recent New York Times article, agrihoods are the next big thing in residential developments, from Fort Collins, Colorado to Northlake, Texas. Riffing on the term CSAs (community-supported agriculture), farmer and consultant Daron “Farmer D” Joffe calls them “DSAs” or “development supported agriculture.” Joffe, who has consulted on several DSAs including Serenbe in Chattahoochee, Georgia, says that farmer managers at these developments can make anywhere from $30,000-$100,000 a year, and they and their families often get tax-free housing, to boot.

Joffe, who ran his own CSA for years and calls the workload-to-pay ratio “brutal,” says that farmers’ low and often unpredictable salaries are the biggest challenge in the industry.

“I’m not saying DSAs are THE solution,” says Joffe. “There’s still this huge question of how to make a living as a farmer. But there’s no doubt that these developments can create more stable job opportunities for beginning farmers. They provide capital, land, and equipment, up front—these are some of the biggest obstacles for new farmers.”

The movement to label genetically modified foods suffered a major blow last month with the defeat of ballot measure 522 in Washington state, which would have required manufacturers to label foods containing GM ingredients.

So what does 522‘s defeat mean for the GM-labeling efforts in Oregon? Ivan Maluski at Friends of Family Farmers, a pro-labeling nonprofit that works on policy issues to protect socially responsible farming in Oregon, says his group will urge Oregon legislators to introduce a labeling law during the February session. “We believe the economic impact would be minimal and that the transparency would benefit consumers,” Maluski told me in an e-mail.

Scott Bates, director of GMO-Free Oregon and chief petitioner for a GM labeling initiative (that, if approved, will be on the ballot in 2014), says his group is also pushing the legislature to introduce a bill in February.

In Washington, many agricultural organizations opposed I-522—including the Washington State Farm Bureau and the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. Whether or not that means Oregon farmers and food processors will be in favor of a GM labeling law remains to be seen.

According to Oregon Department of Agriculture spokesman Bruce Pokarney, Oregon doesn’t grow a lot of GM crops — just sugar beet seed, alfalfa, some field corn, and a smattering of GM canola in eastern Oregon. Presumably that means that most Oregon farmers wouldn’t be impacted by a GM labeling law.

Eleven years ago, when GM labeling initiative Measure 27 tanked here in Oregon, an industry alliance called Oregonians for Food & Shelter opposed the measure. Their members include agriculture groups such as the Oregon Wheat Growers League and and the Oregon Farm Bureau as well as biotech companies including Syngenta, Monsanto, and DuPont.

Blake Rowe, CEO of the Oregon Wheat Growers League, says it’s hard to react to a potential Oregon initiative until he’s read the language but admits that the League — which advocates on behalf of thousands of Oregon wheat growers — would generally oppose a labeling initiative. “It’s just really hard to do something at the state level,” Rose says. “Especially when so much of commerce is at the national level.”

But Maluski says that for Oregon farmers — even conventional (i.e. non-organic) farmers — there’s actually an economic incentive for a labeling law. For example, Oregon farmers who grow non-organic wheat for export to Asia — nearly a $500 million market — already need to ensure that their wheat, though conventionally grown, is uncontaminated by GM crops. Otherwise, they risk losing their biggest market, as they temporarily did last summer after the GM wheat scare in eastern Oregon.

Will a labeling law increase costs for food manufacturers? Craig Ostbo, a managing partner at Portland-based marketing communications firm Koopman-Ostbo has worked on packaging changes for a range of Oregon companies including Kettle Chips, Bob’s Red Mill, Lochmead Farms, and Coconut Bliss. He says he’d be hard pressed to find an economic onus to adding “contains GM soy or corn” to an ingredient deck. “Companies change their packaging all the time,” Ostbo says — without increasing the price of their products. (See the “all natural” and “gluten-free” claims that have proliferated in recent years, not to mention Halloween-themed packaging for candy makers.) Food costs would likely go up if manufacturers chose to reformulate their products so as to avoid GM ingredients, as Michael Lipsky explains in this excellent Grist article.

Judging by what happened a decade ago with Measure 27, it’s not the Oregon farmers and food companies pro-labeling advocates need to worry about. Most of the $5 million spent on the “No” campaign for Measure 27 came from out-of-state corporations including Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Dow. Only a measly $5,500 came from Oregon businesses.

This time around, food-savvy Oregonians are more aware of GM foods, and a handful of deep-pocketed out-of-state donors like Whole Foods, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, the Organic Consumers Union, and Nature’s Path will likely help the pro-labeling side get its message out effectively. Crucially, Oregon’s 2014 general election is when Governor Kitzhaber is up for re-election, which will likely elicit a higher voter turn-out than Washington state had this fall, which was an off-year election.

“A decade is a long time,” says Maluski, referring to the failure of Measure 27. “Now, there’s a greater sense of people wanting to know how their food is being produced, whether with pesticide inputs or GM or other chemicals. Consumers want to make informed decisions.”

01 July 2013

The cows at Straus Family Creamery, grazing on Tomales Bay, California

My love of milk has only increased since I was an infant, which may explain why I'm so drawn to writing about it. But I'm also fascinated by the politics of milk—and by the heated emotions that drinking the beverage—or choosing to spurn the beverage—provoke. Back in 2007—before raw milk was really a thing—I wrote an investigative feature on the controversial drink for Salon. So when an editor at Imbibe asked me if I'd like to write a story about regional dairies, of course I said yes.

As I reported this piece, I became optimistic about the re-emergence of regional dairies. Sure, the milk industry is still dominated by industrial players that co-mingle milk from hundreds of farmers—squeezing these farmers out of every last cent (hello, Horizon). But consumers are starting to get savvy about what they're drinking—not to mention who they're supporting. It's not just that they want milk that's free of antibiotics and growth hormones. (Though they do.) They also want to know where their milk is coming from—preferably traceable to one dairy as opposed to myriad unnamed dairies—and they're increasingly choosing milk from grass-fed cows, which packs a healthier punch. But perhaps most importantly, milk drinkers are looking for a milk that tastes better—and that inevitably means a milk that hasn't been "ultra-pasteurized" at 280 degrees F for two seconds, zapping it of all lactase not to mention all flavor. (Now you know why Horizon Organic lasts for months in your fridge.) After taste tests with his staff, Sam Penix, owner of Manhattan's Everyman Espresso, chose Battenkill Valley Farm's milk. "It's really malty and sweet and thick and creamy," he told me. "It pairs really well with coffee."

To read about the family-run dairies I interviewed for my story—from New York, California, and even Alabama—grab a copy of the July/August issue of Imbibe (page 62). (There are also great stories on mead, sparkling white wines, and the sugarcane industry in Martinique.) Or you can just download the PDF here: Download Imbibe_HWallace